Spring Projects

We are finally getting to the projects that we did not have time for in the fall, when we realized we had missed the warm weather window (how's that for alliteration?) for applying exterior paints and wood conditioners. D has been raking up and bagging most of the remaining leaves. Today he also applied Thompsons Water Seal to the little bits of bare wood holding up our back porch steps. I took on a few projects as well:

First, last week, I made what will probably be my only attempt this year at landscaping (I retreat inside when it gets warm and buggy), by adding a pretty pink jasmine plant (jasmimum polyanthum) to our lamppost. I'm not one for gardening but there was a great idea in a magazine to wrap a lamppost in chicken wire and then plant a viney plant at the base, so that it will grow up the post. Here it is before I filled in the hole:

I tied the (plastic) wire on with zip ties and then tied the vines to it gently with string. It doesn't look very impressive but the area gets a lot of sun and no little critters have tried to eat it yet, so I consider that a good sign for future growth.

Here's a picture of what it could look like in bloom, one day:

(photo credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/mondomuse/3268234488/)

While I was digging a hole for the jasmine plant, I started to realize exactly how annoying it was that we had a "bumper crop" of acorns this year. Besides loudly falling on my car all fall, those little guys really set up house. I photographed just a few but I pulled out dozens. They are in all our flower beds, making themselves comfortable--safe from any mowing activity:

At this rate we are going to end up living on an oak tree farm!

Today my big project was to cover the bare wood on our picture window. It's a lot harder to scrape paint, even barely-adhering paint, than I thought. I spent an hour or so hacking at it with a metal scraper, a wire brush, and a razor. Even though I figured the paint was not original to the house, I wore a little face mask in case there was lead dust. (They make home-buyers sign so many lead-disclosures that I think they made me a little paranoid.)

The obligatory "before" shots (this was after I scraped most of the loose paint, so the windows look even worse than usual).

We used Sherwin William's Duration Exterior in gloss finish. Since we didn't know exactly what color "white" we were working with and how much of the window's color was actually just dirt and aging, we went with untinted out-of-the-can white. It is definitely different, but we are hoping that a little rain, sun, and dirt evens it out. It's close enough that you can't see the difference in the photo:

(Isn't it nice of our cat to model for us?)

And finally, a few more random yard shots of our flowering plants. If you are able to identify any of them, let us know.

Pretty pink blossoms that the bees seem to love (also a view of our as-yet untreated window, if you look closely):

Beautiful white blooms near our garage.

And mystery buds on a tree in our backyard (with more pictures of the fully-bloomed tree to follow).