On Mondays we like to blog about our latest landscaping project. The hope being people that want to DIY or landscapers and designers new to the trade might pick up hints and ideas. Not much progress was made on either project last week due to rain. We got between 6″ to 8″ of rain depending on which gauge you look at on the Harris County Flood Warning Rain fall totals page. Most ever day we were rained-out after lunch and even when it wasn’t actually raining it was a big mucky mess. Friday we woke up to a hard rain and knew we were not going to be working at all. After doing payroll and some errands we had a nice lunch at a local cafe. Then: what do do with our suddenly free afternoon? This year, our 5th doing business as Ravenscourt Landscaping & Design LLC, we are finding all our hard work, marketing and diligence to building a good reputation keeps potential customers coming to us on a regular basis and we are booking further and further out. The problem is you can only have people wait so long before you lose their business. So we have been focusing a lot of our energy on growing our crew to the point of being able to run two projects at once. This means a foreman and more mobility. And we were getting to the point where we need to buy a second truck. The timing is good because we are just about to pay off our current truck.

Above is “Henry” a 2007 F150 we bought used in 2009; he has been a real workhorse and still going strong with over 100,000 miles. We have been talking about what we need to be looking for in a second truck all summer. We preferred white and wanted to stick with the F150 but what we really needed was a 4 door with a back seat so we can get more of the crew to where we need them. Having the free afternoon we thought: “hey let’s go look today.” So we headed to the nearest Ford dealership’s previously owned department. With as much abuse as a work truck takes it doesn’t seem practical to buy a new one. After just a few minutes we found one that had everything we wanted and very little we didn’t. That was a bit strange, like wait a minute, that is too easy. So after getting as much information as we could we left and went home to do a bit more research and think it through. I love that they now have Car Facts and you can find out quite a lot about a car’s history. By dinner time we were back and making an offer. And here is “Rosy” a 2013 truck with 17,000 miles and still under bumper to bumper warranty.

Happy Gardening!