Setting the stage

This is what a season's worth of yard projects looks like:

Looking around at what we still wanted to do this year, we cashed in pretty much every single credit card reward point to our name for a stack of Home Depot gift cards. We figure there are no black-out dates for these things (and travel on rewards is so difficult to book).

Then, I happened to ask my currently unemployed brother whether he wanted to help Tai build a fence this year and he enthusiastically said yes. I'm sure we can make him regret it.

The Office

When we moved into the house, we basically just dumped everything that has typically gone in our office in here, closed the door and left it looking like this for about 10 months.

For our previous office set-ups we had a desk top made that we put on top of some filing cabinets. Here it is in our first place:

We really wanted to come up with a custom solution with built-in desks and shelves and make a really beautiful home office for the new house. Until that can happen, we needed a temp solution that still allowed us to function in that room.

In October, I got tired of staring at it (and trying to keep company from opening that door). Kersten went out of town for a couple of days this fall and being finally sick of having no functional home office, I decided to do something about it. Now keep in mind that this is not meant to be a permanent solution, but it does a pretty good job for now and best of all I didn't have to spend a single penny on it.

First, I took the above pictured desk top and ripped it down the middle with my table saw. We thought we might want to use it for something else at some point, but that point was seeming a long ways off and we had need of it now. I made two desks out of it and placed them on opposite walls of the office on top of the filing cabinets we already had.

Then, I used the above fridge cabinet that got scrapped during the fridge debacle last year as a cabinet for our computer printers and scanner and other peripherals.

Once the desks were set up I then spent about 12 hours going through 10 months of clutter and bills that needed filing to get it all cleaned up and functional.

It's been hard to know what to do next. We can't really find designs that we like and fit our style and the space. Any suggestions or inspirational sites?

These new homes are real killers

Saturday we wanted to knock out a bit of yard work before another storm rolled in, so Tai mowed the lawn for the first time this season, then put down a fertilizer/herbicide, while I cleared a spot to plant a peach tree. We got those finished up and were about to start laying weed barrier fabric on our dirt stretches in the front yard when Tai went inside and stepped in this:

We had a similar puddle on the other side of that wall in our mud room. Water was seeping throughout the west end of our first floor via all the micro cracks (you can see that in the picture). Lots and lots of panic ensued. Can we avoid swollen dry wall? How deep is the leak? Which pipe is it? Will the baseboard be ok? Why is our entire first floor weeping? How the #$%^ did this happen? Why do these things always happen on the weekends? Etc.

We did what we always do in these situations, which is call Tai's dad for a dose of serenity and reassurance before tearing into the wall. The wall that divides the kitchen and the mud room is a shear wall, meaning that it's faced with plywood for stability in the event of an earthquake, meaning that even if we cut into the drywall we will have a lot of depth and structural stuff to cut through to get to the plumbing in the guts of the wall. One side of that wall was covered with kitchen cabinets and a counter top, and the other side had some lovely brand-new cabinets. Remember these?

They shortly looked like this:

Tai and his dad (who graciously and cheerfully gave up his Saturday to come help us) actually pulled the counter top off as well in order to cut a hole near where we knew the leak was coming from.

We thought that the problem wasn't in the regular house plumbing because we hadn't done anything unusual lately and hadn't gotten a leak until Saturday. The only thing we did Saturday that we don't normally do is use the hose (to water the nascent peach tree) -- Tai's first thought is that he had somehow punctured the hose supply line while hanging the cabinetry last week. As it turns out, it was a burst hose bib -- most likely my fault, from not properly draining and emptying and disconnecting the hose at some point during the winter. 

Oops.

Tai and his dad confirmed this theory after cutting into the wall near the hose bib connection in the mud room. They chopped off the hose bib, which is a long length of copper pipe sheathing that goes deep into an interior wall -- so as to prevent exactly this type of freeze-burst! -- with a bit of pex tubing coming out the interior wall side for the water supply.

After a couple of trips to England Plumbing (seriously, they are the best) for the correct size replacement bib and a tool rental, they were happily cutting into the bones of the house and installing the new part.

We are no longer leaking, but we're not putting the cabinetry back together until we can fill in the hole with some foam for insulation of the hose connector. And I shall train myself from now on to always, always, always turn off the water and disconnect the hose. (Oops.)

I sheepishly stayed out of the way during the repairs and tried to make myself useful in other ways. So I got some of the weed fabric down -- turns out that you're supposed to get rid of all the weeds first, so I spent much of the afternoon on my hands and knees digging up all sorts of nasty little things. Then, I roughly graded the covered spots and finally tacked down the fabric:

We're hoping that this stuff makes life a little easier -- so far our greatest gardening successes have been the quantity and variety of weeds our yard supports. Sooner rather than later we hope to layer a lot of mulch on top, and we're hoping for a few plants down the road as well. We also got our lawn aerated cheaply by some folks trolling the neighborhood for business, meaning that now we do not need to spend several hours and $ grabbing a Home Depot rental aerator. The peach tree that (sort of) started it all:

So lesson learned: I said we were going to blog more, and the universe said, "You want to blog more? I'll give you something to blog about!" Then, right as this all was starting to develop, I mentioned to Tai that if nothing else this will make a good story, and he said, "I'm TIRED of having good stories." Here's hoping for nothing but boring updates for the rest of the season.

(And thanks to the friends/family who called or stopped by after reading my panicked Facebook status update. You guys are the best.)

Emerging from hibernation

I smelled fresh cut grass yesterday on a short walk outside, which must mean that it's time to wake up the blog and all the house/yard projects. I wish I could say that we spent the winter painting or re-arranging or decorating or doing anything besides sitting on our rears, but alas. We needed a nice long break from home improvement.

But, we're back! And after hopping around all winter trying to get boots on and off, we decided to put some time and effort into cabinetry for the mudroom. I think we needed a break from Ikea, too, because going back after a looooong absence wasn't as painful as we were expecting. Their showroom had a nice butler's pantry/mud room set up, using a new dimension of wall cabinetry (18"x30") as base cabinets with a counter on top for a nice bench surface. Given that this is a relatively private room in the house -- we're pretty much the only ones who ever see or use it -- a less expensive, but still totally functional solution appealed to us.


We need to thank our friend Larry for coming over and helping us maneuver heavy flat-pack boxes in and around the yard. (Tai cracked a couple of ribs in a ski accident a few weeks ago, so moving some of the bigger stuff was pretty painful for him.) Nice-ish weather meant an expanded work area.

And, of course, I have no "before" pictures. Just imagine an enormous pile of dirty shoes, framed with a random tall cabinet (reject from the kitchen), our stash of grocery bags, and a ski boot or four. Our dimensions didn't exactly match Ikea's, so Tai hacked together an end piece that fits quite nicely.

 

 Wouldn't be a project without a little pain, or in this case, a drywall gouge on an otherwise mint wall.

 

We are very pleased with the look. We had debated going with a more expensive countertop or door option, but this seems to fit our house just perfectly and actually looks like the much more expensive white doors we passed on.

(And of course those are my shoes still on the floor. Tai hasn't trained me yet.)
And if we can ever get the Flor website to cooperate, we may have some rugs to show you in the next week or so...

Crucial update

Before two feet of snow took up residence in our backyard we figured out that it was a raccoon or raccoons who had been relieving themselves on our lawn. Lots of paw prints and a sighting.

Carry on.

A little privacy

Sorry about the absence of blogging for the last two months. Life got really busy with some un-fun stuff. On top of that, our projects have been pretty low-key lately (replant this thing, mow that, etc.), with one exception: a wall on our patio.

We have a gorgeous outdoor space that we access just off our dining area. Because we're working on landscaping, decor, and finishes slowly, this space was totally exposed to the street on its east end. Part of the design of the house was always to have a wall on this end of the patio as a privacy shield to the street, so when we poured the concrete for the patio almost a year ago (!), Davido added some bolts to the pony wall in anticipation of this eventuality.

After pricing things out and thinking of the best way to maximize our limited budgets and claim the most privacy for the house, we settled on this patio wall as the first step. (Future steps will include a fence with the neighbors, a gate for this wall, and some window coverings for the dining area. All in good time, though.)

Tai did a couple of designs before we settled on one that would fit the horizontal cedar on the house. He grabbed the hardware to attach upright posts to the concrete wall and framed everything out in mid-August:


All that plywood cladding was reused from our construction scrap stash -- win-win for the dump and our wallets.


The wall sat dormant for a few weeks at this intermediate stage. It worked immediately, though, as we were able to enjoy our patio without sharing it with every passing pedestrian and driver.

Then, Tai used some scrap tar paper for some mild water-resistance at the top of the wall, and started putting up the cedar boards Labor Day weekend. He used a few leftover cedar boards from siding the house and garage, and then filled in the rest with a trip to Sutherlands. He pre-sealed the boards with two coats to match what we did on the boards for the house.


He did a great job spacing the ends of the boards uniformly on both sides of the wall so that there aren't any awkward joining spots. This is where it really pays to have married someone who spent his entire childhood working on house projects -- he is precise and meticulous about doing it right. He takes only a little more time, but he makes it look a hundred times better.


My sole contribution to this project (besides replenishing the water pitcher) was to stain the cedar at the end of it all to get it the same deep beautiful color as the wood on the house. This took me all of about 20 minutes, but I still managed to dribble stain on the concrete, which you can see if you look closely at the bottom left of the wall. Oops.

I think that spacing out the house/yard projects makes it easier for us to enjoy them along the way. We were really hoping to fence in the backyard (especially because various neighborhood animals -- please, please let it be animals -- keep using our yard to relieve themselves), but that will probably have to wait. In the meantime, it's still been great to make incremental progress where we can. Oh, and our house is still awesome.

Mid-summer yard update

This is the year of the great squash experiment. Not knowing a blessed thing about the plants we were planting (as in, did you know that pumpkin vines can grow to be 35-40 feet in length? I didn't!), we have overloaded our tiny backyard garden box with two pumpkin vines, a yellow squash vine/bush, a zucchini plant, four cucumber plants and two broccoli plants.

The overall effect:


Up close with squash overload. Zucchini in the top right and one of the pumpkin vines in the bottom left:


Produce! This is so far the only pumpkin we have produced for our pains. It is ripe, beautiful and lovely. So now we have a pumpkin in August.


These pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped themselves around patches of grass in the backyard, holding on for dear life. I think they're gorgeous on their own, though.


The broccoli...that we're hoping will turn into something edible one of these days:


The cucumber vines and our nascent basil plant:


Fresh cucumbers from the garden are our top delight this summer:


Pepperoncini, for which I have my doubts, mostly due to serious overshadowing by pumpkin leaves:


That's all in one garden box. In the other backyard box, we planted a couple of varieties of carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Little Finger and Carnival Blend -- Carnival was the least successful).


And this is what happens when you get a radish packet from Matthew Moore at Sundance and figure, eh? Why not? But then realize that neither of you like radishes (nasty little things):


Then, we have a third garden box (clearly in over our heads) by the kitchen. By and large it has been scorched by the heat and exposure of our site, but a few things have survived. Namely, the tomato plants that I didn't kill are now threatening to take over the house:


And this is the end of a fight with arugala. It started out so lovely, with spring greens that we added to salads and quiches. It ended with an insane patch of flowering plants that crowded out everything else. So I hacked it back:



...and made room for a watermelon vine that has showed its appreciation for the extra space by doubling in size over the last few days. I'm still hoping that this will produce something before the first frost.


In the rest of the yard, our front yard on the south side was not getting full coverage from the sprinklers. So now that Tai is a pro, he added a few extra heads to hit our borders:


But the best thing about the summer has been slowing down and enjoying the results of all our hard work over the last 18 months. It's a bit surreal to think of where we were a year ago and where we are now. That was a lifetime ago.