Posts Tagged Yard

Gardening

It’s been a few years since I’ve had any vegetables in my raised beds, so today I went out and spent a bunch of money. Here’s the layout:

I’m sticking with tomatoes, peppers, and garlic in the main bed. I want stuff that will grow without too much intervention, like thinning or pruning, and that I know I will eat.

Then I built a mini-greenhouse out of garden stakes, zip ties, 3-mil sheeting, and 1x2s:

Since I’m cooking so much more than I used to, I want herbs that won’t go bad in the refrigerator between uses, so I’m going to try a windowsill herb garden. Left to right I have oregano, rosemary, thyme, and basil:

Last, I cleared out part of the bed over by the work shed and planted strawberries. I may clear out the rest of the bed and plant either raspberries or more strawberries.


And now to go inside and sit in my comfy chair before I get too much fresh air poisoning.

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Lilac Down!

Jen stopped by the other day and pointed out that one of the lilacs against the retaining wall at the front of the property had fallen over.

Turns out all the main trunks of the middle lilac were completely rotten and mostly hollow.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe lilacs just aren’t supposed to get to tree size, since the lilac in the side yard that was twenty feet tall with a 10″ trunk was also rotten and hollow before I cut it down. In any case, I pulled out the rest of that lilac, and what’s left is a whole bunch of 1/4″ shoots coming up from the ground next to the stump, so I guess those are fine.

Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I just shouldn’t pull them all out and replace them with something that’s going to do a better job of screening and will look nicer. They’re not particularly pretty even when they’re in bloom, and they’re kind of thin and unruly, and evidently if they continue on they’ll rot and fall over anyway. I suppose I could fertilize them and see if they perked up and came in better, but I suspect I’d just end up fertilizing the morning glory and blackberries that keep trying to take over that bed.

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Scratch One Rhododendron

When we moved in, there was essentially a rhododendron tree in the corner of the front yard. We had it trimmed back to bush size, but Jen has always hated it. So I finally decided that I needed to get over my fear of chainsaws and get rid of the damn thing.

After pruning with the shears

Post chainsaw

 

After cleanup

Now to fill in the bare zone with grass seed (I’m overseeding the whole lawn this week sometime). Maybe I can even get out the sawzall and cut the stump down even further.

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Squatters

Jen looked out the window yesterday and noticed that we had visitors:

Two big fat raccoons scurried up the pear tree and into the treehouse. I saw them again later going up, so it’s pretty clear that they’re living there. Yet another reason to take the damn thing down.

In other news, I bailed out the pond and pulled the liner out of the awful brick patio area. It’s now a rather precipitous hole in the ground, but at least it isn’t a drowing hazard.

I also fought Round 1 of Eleventy Zillion of Homeowner vs. Morning Glory and filled up most of a 50-gallon yard waste bin with stuff from around the sides of the yard and the front gardens. (Apparently beauty bark barely even slows the stuff down.) The hole in the ground allowed me to get at some of the deeper roots, which were pencil-thick, so I think as we gradually pull off the brick and the 10-mil, I’ll spend some time with a trowel and dig down a foot or so to pull up as many roots as possible.

We still haven’t gotten our tax return back, so I’m still stymied on getting anything more on the house proper done. Soon! Soon there will be new electricity, and then there will be demo!

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Yard Work

So long time no post from me and all that. Yeah yeah yeah, I know.

The bathroom is still tantalizingly incomplete. I bought window and door casings from Second Use and cut them to size, but now they’re sitting in my basement unsanded, unprimed, unpainted, and uninstalled. And of course I still haven’t done anything about the tub/shower valve escutcheon, although I did fix the broken screw in the shower arm drop-ear, so it’s solid again.

The main point of this update is the most recent bit of yard work Jen and I did last weekend. It’s been unseasonally good weather the last week or so (it stopped today, naturally), so first Jen got out and raked up all the leaves, sticks, and dead morning glory from the side yard.

As it turns out, there’s actually a brick patio underneath all of it, not just a bit.

Typically for this house and yard, whichever previous owner installed it installed it wrong — there’s no base of gravel and compacted sand, no! They just laid down bricks over black plastic directly onto the dirt, so of course it’s all wavy and uneven. Sigh.

But: since I’m pretty sure the bricks are pavers and not wall bricks, we’ll be able to save them and use them for our own patio to be overlaid over the existing concrete patio directly behind the house. Someday. Yay!

As you can see by the photos, there’s also a pond — we knew it was there but didn’t realize it was about 30 inches deep. Apparently there was supposed to be an upper pond with a stream and a waterfall leading to the lower pond. I’m sure a shrubbery was involved somehow. In any case, it’s going to be siphoned out and removed and eventually appear on a Craigslist advertisement.

So: last weekend we acquired a lawn mower from a friend’s shed where it had been sitting idle for at least three years. A $50 trip to a local lawnmower repair guy later, I was able to mow the entire front lawn for the first time in five months. As you can see, the entry looks a lot nicer when it doesn’t look like a jungle:

The mower doesn’t have drive wheels like the mowers I used to use as a teenager, but at least our yard is almost entirely flat.

I would have continued mowing and done the back yard, but since there were huge piles of yard waste covering parts of it I figured I’d take care of those first. The largest pile under the trees was mostly leaves and sticks and not so much morning glory. I filled up the 40-gallon yard waste bin plus nine big Home Depot bags:

You can see more or less where the pile was — everything in the area from the leftmost tree to the fence to the concrete driveway was a foot and a half or more deep in crap:

Meanwhile, Jen completed (or nearly so) work on the front garden beds, which are going to look very nice when they’re planted with flowers in the spring:

Sadly, the end of the great yard cleaning is still pretty far off. Not only do the piles of dead morning glory in the first picture remain, but in the raised area at the southeast corner is this:

We’re kinda scared to poke about in this treacherous pile of junk, construction debris, tree branches, weeds, and rocks to even determine how bad it is. And there’s another similar pile on the other side of the garden shed. When the clerk at Home Depot saw me buying twenty yard waste bags, he commented, “Those are pretty big, you know.” To which I could only reply, “Oh, believe me, I’ll be back for more…”

Finally, since it was such a nice day and both Jen and I were working outside, we brought Thekla out to play, which led to lots of hysterical crying. Turns out she’s terrified of grass.

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Bathroom Demo Part 2

Well, I didn’t get nearly as much done today as I thought I would, even though we were on the job longer than yesterday.

First thing we did when we got there today was move all the rolled-up demoed carpet from the basement to the garden shed, which took an absurdly long time. Then I got back to work on the remaining drywall in the bathroom.

Just like yesterday, it resisted. A lot. Mostly because it was laid directly over wood (so I couldn’t punch through it and had to scrape at it from the edges instead) and was fastened not with brittle drywall screws but with big honking two-inch eight-penny roofing nails, placed randomly in ones and twos across the sheet.

There’s still sheets of maybe 3/8″ plywood against the studs in the non-plumbed walls of the tub, so I don’t know what’s back there yet, but so far the only visible rot is in the bottom of the side sheet of plywood and a 2×4 blocking in the plumbing wall just at the level of the tub/surround seam.

I did manage to find where the knob & tube wiring interfaces with the romex that goes into the new-work switch and socket. All the lights in the entire house (plus the refrigerator) are wired into one double circuit breaker, and there’s a carrier line for that circuit that goes above the bathroom ceiling, so I hope I can cut and cap the wires coming down into the bathroom without killing any other lights (for now).

WTF part #2: the duct tape “repairs” on the shower surround weren’t actually repairs. Apparently they bought a shower surround built for a modern hotel-style valve and faucet/shower placement, and then just duct-taped over the misplaced holes and drilled their own.

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Here’s some more shots of the bathroom gutted down to the studs.

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I was going to try to save the 3″ tongue-and-groove boards inside the closet, but when I tried removing the first one carefully, it broke right away, so I said the hell with it and just pulled them down with my gloved hands:

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Meanwhile, Jen was shoveling up more rotted pears from the yard and dousing the basement in Simple Green.

Jen wants me to post this part:

Why Jen Hates The Previous Owners:

Not only did they let their cats pee all over the carpets downstairs, but they left bags and bags full of junk in the basement. Not only did they leave their crappy little 2×4-and-plywood desk screwed to the wall in the bedroom, but they left hundreds and hundreds of pounds of trash in the garage and shed — and we’re talking a busted fridge, a busted stove, broken snowboards, a computer monitor, old magazines, a safe that looks like it’s been blown up, and lots lots more.

Worst is the southeast corner, where apparently the previous previous owner put in a retaining wall with the plan of having a waterfall and a little pond. The previous owners allowed that entire area to be overrun with morning glory (I saw the 2007 high-res satellite photo on the monitor at the permit office, and large parts of that area weren’t green), and at this point Jen literally cannot tell where the ground is, there’s so much rotted wood, asphalt shingles, old dishwashers, pond liners, broken bricks, broom handles, wheelbarrows, etc., etc., strewn everywhere and now all grown through with bindweed.

Not only does this represent hundreds more dollars just in dump fees, but it’s also going to take months and months if not years just to clear it. All the while it’ll be a hazard to everybody, not least our daughter who will certainly be bipedal and running around by next spring.

WTF #3: Jen found it almost impossible to scrape up the adhesive underlayment left over from the vinyl flooring in the downstairs basement. She called me down to look at it, and I discovered that in most of the bathroom area the cement underneath the mastic was rough and pebbly. This means to me that when the POs jackhammered up the old slab and installed the bathroom fixtures, they didn’t bother floating the new cement afterwards to smooth it out but just called it a day and slapped the vinyl over it.

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She then demolished most of the stud wall between the walk in closet and the platform the spa tub was going to go on, all of which is in the way of the planned basement bedroom.

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I spent about an hour up in the attic trying to shovel the rockwool insulation away from the basement ceiling, but they don’t call it rockwool for nothing. That crap is dense, and it sticks together in clumps. At that point we got called away because our friend finally called us back about a 10% off coupon from Home Depot she had for us, and we dropped everything and headed out. That was about 4pm. Unfortunately, we had a lot of big heavy stuff to buy at HD, and not much time before we were supposed to pick up our daughter Thekla from her nanny/daycare at 6pm (we were an hour late), so we were rushing around and I’m sure forgot a bunch of stuff that we needed but wasn’t specced out on the materials list.

We rented one of HD’s trucks (since 4×8 greenboard ain’t fitting in the trunk of my Saturn) and drove it the couple miles to the house, where our friend Chris was kind enough to meet us to help unload. (I’ve never driven anything before that beeped when I backed up. 🙂 ) After getting the truck back we discovered that we had forgotten to load the toilet, but Jen threw herself on the mercy of the delivery coordinator and got them to deliver it for us tomorrow for free.

Plan for tomorrow:

  1. Make nice with the building inspector when he shows up and get him to sign off on the reframing plans.* The only conceivably controversial part will be the new basement stairs going through the old entry hall area, since there might need to be a widening of the foundation wall opening.
  2. Drop the bathroom ceiling and just clean up the fracking rockwool when it falls down (I’ll just put R30 fiberglass batts up when I’m done).
  3. Pull up the vinyl flooring in the bathroom and see what condition the subfloor is in.
  4. Demo the stub wall at the end of the tub.

Really, that should about do it. If I get to capping the wiring and plumbing I’ll feel really happy.

And now I’m going to bed. By the way, Flexeril is a wonderful wonderful thing.

 

* This is the preliminary inspection. Seattle has a class of permit called “Subject To Field Inspection”, meaning the job isn’t complicated enough to require full engineering drawings and formal review; instead the inspector just eyeballs the plans and the building before the work starts and approves or not, and then comes out when you’re done and checks that you did it right.

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My first days working in the house:

Bryan spent the last couple days prepping to work at the house. Friday I took the baby down to see him, and I wanted to start some of my work at the house but to be honest the permit process and cost was quite a blow, and I wanted all of us to be together to remember why we are spending all this money. It’s for family and it’s for our home, sometimes we have to remember that even when it comes with a high price tag.

Friday night I started tearing up the carpet and the padding in the basement which is a pain in the freaking butt because though you can cut through the carpet like butter but the mat is dense, dense, dense. Sadly it’s quality pad that is utterly drenched in cat pee.

I got about half of it up:
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Came upstairs and the baby was sleeping on the job:
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Today we dropped the baby off with a friend with the hopes of getting a lot more kicked out.. I finished up all the carpet and pad downstairs and managed to pull up the linoleum in the half bath downstairs.
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After being gassed out in the basement by cat pee I decided I needed to be outside. I have a half yard that is drowning in rotten pears and I have started raking them up.
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Then I turned by gaze to the morning glory, I hate that damn morning glory. I hate it with the fury of a million burning suns. It’s eaten half of the yard and it infuriates me. It’s covered.. EVERYTHING!! I am trying to find what the heck is under it. It’s a danger because it conceals all kinds of unsafe crap: tillers, broken chairs, ponds, shingles, boards. All forming a crappy covered dangerous rat and freaking possum condos.
I was able to pull a tiny bit off some of the retaining wall.
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But the rest of it just sits out there giving me the stinkeye.
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Damn morning glory, I hate you.

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Introductory post from the wife

Bryan has encouraged me multiple times to update the blog. Unfortunately up to this point any post that I would have made would have been complaints about how much I hated the purchase process interjected with random cursing. Now that paperwork has been signed I feel more comfortable outlining my immediate goals with the house.

While Bryan is tearing down and ripping out the bathroom for it’s remodel before we move into the house, I will be tearing out the carpeting from downstairs that the previous owner kindly let their cats pee all over. Having four cats of our own we don’t really want ours getting a whiff of the previous damage so they can pick up the bad habit. It does break my heart to tear out the carpet because it seems to be one of the few things that the previous tenants actually did fairly well. They actually used a really good padding and it appears properly laid. Sadly it is soaked to the core in urine.

My other goal is to get all the rooms primed. Seeing as we are replacing all the wood paneling in the house it seems silly to paint it the actual color I really want only to tear it out in a couple months. But some of the colors are simply atrocious. I figure it’s better to live with primer white till then than say…

This is the baby’s room:

And the current color of the master bedroom:

Not good.

Then the major project that I have decided is mine and mine alone, the yard. It appears someone in the past had some grandiose ideas. There is a pond, and some build up for what appeared to be a water fall, and even a composting bin. Of course looking at the yard you would have never known because it’s all hidden under half of a yard of morning glory. I have found my arch-nemesis. Morning glory is the devil. It has eaten up almost fifty percent of the yard and I can’t have that.. (said wearing my steely-eyed Clint Eastwood face)  I have also planned a consultation with our friend’s gardener because there are flowers interspersed amongst the weeds and when I am cleaning out the horrifically overgrown flowerbeds next to the house I don’t want to pull out something I am going to have to pay to have later. It’s all just such a jumbled mess I have know clue what’s what. I have recently grown to love having my own vegetable garden and plan to put one at the house to in raised beds.

My back hurts already.

Now we just finalize packing up the old house for the move. We are almost finished, only a few bits and pieces to finish..

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