Bye Bye Pine Shrub!

We had an ugly piney ever-green shrub outside our guest room window. It bugged me from the moment I first took a critical look at my yard. D was doubtful that we would be able to remove it by ourselves and figured we would have to hire someone. Fortunately, I also have awesome parents.

I don't have any good "before" pictures but you can check out the picture of our house from the top of the page. All you really need is the "after" picture, which is basically the sight that greeted me one day in April when I came home from work.

Obviously I knew my parents were coming to visit and even that they were going to come help us remove the shrub. And do other odd jobs related to making our yard prettier. They are good landscapers and took pity on us after this post.

So anyway, they got to the house before I made it home and got right to work--there was practically no shrub left by the time I arrived. Most of it looked like this:

The plan was to remove the lilac bushes from the back of the house, where they were languishing in the shade, and move them to where the shrub had been. Again, I anticipated a struggle. But my parents made it look easy, uprooting and moving 4 bushes (partially thanks to our neat little garden cart).

Of course I took this picture and then one week later, the azaleas bloomed (and have now since died again). But if you can't tell, there is liriope grass, then azaleas, then a lot of mulch and then lilac bushes. And then space so that I can FINALLY get to the darn hose faucet, which was always so buried in pine shrubs and spider webs.

Given this arrangement, we need to find a nice mid-height flowering thing to go in between the azaleas and the lilacs, so please suggest some hearty things that could go in there.

Clearing the lilac bushes from the back also gave us the space to continue ripping up ivy. We really are slowly taking back our backyard from icky ground cover, but that's a post for another time.

Finally, check out these cool irises! My friend dug some up last fall and gave them to us and they came up beautifully. I love the stiff, precise-looking leaves. Not every one of them flowered though--I assume they're still adjusting to their new habitat.

Hope you all had a lovely Memorial Day!

Clean and Cool

It's gotten too hot to ignore anymore and we broke our unspoken rule of not turning on the air conditioner before June 1. This year we decided to increase our AC's efficiency and lifespan by giving it a good cleaning. It turned out to be pretty easy, though obviously we have no idea if it did any good. Most websites seem to recommend a cleaning every 2-3 years and we didn't do it last summer, so it seemed like we might as well. Plus it costs next to nothing. The only thing we needed to buy was a can of specialty cleaner, which is sold at any Home Depot for $5.

AC-Safe Air Conditioning Coil Foaming Cleaner

We didn't buy any fin repair brushes, because most of them are for 8-15 fins per inch. It was hard to get in and measure because of the outer grate, but we had at least 22 fins per inch and just a quick look made it clear that they were too close together to be able to push into shape.

Here's the before picture. I'll warn you that the after picture isn't all that dramatic. One thing we did was move the azalea bush on the right. It's not really a good idea to have things right beside the AC, since it needs air flow and also because it can create dust and pollen that will get sucked right in. We kept the hosta because it does a good job of camouflaging the AC and also because it doesn't create any pollen.

The first step in all the guides was to unplug the unit. Seemed like a good idea:

Next D took the screws out of the top and lifted it off, so that I could get in there with our shop vac and suck up all the leaves and debris. I didn't take an "after" picture, so just trust me: no more leaves down there.

Then it was time for the foaming cleaner. It says it doesn't need to be hosed off, but we wanted to take advantage of the water pressure to remove more gunk. So I sprayed it on (we only used one bottle but I could imagine needing two on a slightly bigger unit) and let it do its foam thing and then we hosed it down. The fins are so close together that the water didn't really permeate, so we did the inside and the outside separately.

At first I was worried about getting the inside wet. Until D pointed out that the whole thing is open and exposed to the elements. Oh yeah! But we still tried to keep the water only to the fins and not to the condenser bag or near any of the wires.

Here is the after picture, still foamy from all the cleaner that we rinsed off. As I said, there's not much difference except that all the greenery has been cleared away. The fins definitely are a little cleaner too, though its too small a difference to tell from a photo.

In all, it took about an hour, not counting the azalea transplant. It definitely took two people, because someone has to hold up the top (which is still attached by wires to the rest of the AC) while the other person vacuums out the inside. Otherwise though, a very easy project--especially if it means extending the life of our AC! Step two of the project, still on our to-do list, is to replace the filters inside the house. We need to figure out the right size though and keep forgetting. But anyway, that's for a different post.

Our Eastern Pavilion

No posts lately as we've been spending all our time outdoors doing yard work. All our time. I'm sick of the outdoors and getting more and more tempted to hire a landscaper. But one outdoor activity that we'd been looking forward to all year was putting up our super-cheap gazebo that we bought at Plow and Hearth late last fall. It was packed into an itty bitty box and we were skeptical that all the parts were there, but we were hopeful.

It became evident quickly that we might need a few extra hands. The gazebo is made up of a 6 rounded horizontal bars with 6 vertical poles and then 6 more pieces to extend the ceiling. Nothing was very stable until it was all assembled, so there were some fun moments trying to stabilize and build at the same time.

But once we had the bars up, zipped on the roof and the screen walls, and put in the supports, we were pleasantly surprised both by how stable it was and how cute it looked. Our lawn furniture, courtesy of Kmart and a mishmash of things we already owned, looked really good in there.

Note the hammock in the back--also another haven to relax in, at least until the bugs come out. I was hoping it might fit in the gazebo so I could hide from things that bite, but no such luck.

My only complain was how empty the roof looked. I searched high and low online for hanging votives, candle chandeliers, and other random decor without having much luck. I almost settled for these on Amazon but they still weren't quite right. I was looking for something a little more eastern, like Turkish or Moroccan. I tried searching google images and stumbled on this website: http://www.thisnext.com/. I'm not usually a fan of aggregators that have no real content but this was the lead that brought me to World Market, which never occurred to me. Even better--we have a World Market not too far from home. So off we went in search of lanterns. Did we succeed? I think that's a resounding YES!

I scattered 6 lanterns on each of the ceiling beams, anchoring them in place with a tiny piece of sticky felt that we usually put on the bottoms of our furniture. I bought fake candles to put inside them, since using real candles near the fabric roof made me nervous. We're having a party on Saturday and I think this will definitely help set the scene. Even if they did cost almost as much as the gazebo (I told you--it was really really on sale by late fall).

A Stinky Situation

You may remember during our insulation day that some plumbing problems were uncovered. When we finally had a plumber come pay us a visit, what he found was very interesting indeed. There was definitely a leak in the sewer pipe and it was definitely somewhere between the second floor bathroom and the basement. After some measuring and estimating, the plumber did this to the wall:

Fortunately this is inside a closet. And even a closet we don't use much--usually it stores our out-of-season coats and random stuff. Still, this was no small hole:

Here I am, for scale.

For that, the plumber charged us about $100. I can put a hole in the wall for free (and probably by accident), but I suppose that a professional hole is far superior. He explained that sewer pipes for houses built in the 1950s came one of two ways. The better (and more expensive way) was a full pipe. The cheaper and more fragile way was with two half pipes soldered together. And of course that was what we had. And we had a crack about the width of a finger. Having hammered a hole in the wall, he left for the day.

Begin round two: the plumber came back another time, much earlier in the day, to take care of all the work ahead of him. He shut the water off to that part of the house, cut out the leaky pipe, and put in a PVC pipe. And that was that. The scary thing is that at some point, this might be the fate of our whole house's plumbing system. The other scary thing was, of course, the price, but we won't get into that here. Let's just say it cost far more than just making a hole in the wall.

The expense didn't even include fixing the hole. Rather than try to replace the plaster, which sounded incredibly hard, we decided to build an access door. We know there's a pipe there, so why cover it. And anyway, this is the back wall of a usually-full closet. So we picked up a nice aspen board at Lowes's that barely even needs sanding (they have a much nicer lumber selection than Home Depot), and will screw it in place through the studs. Maybe one day we'll even paint everything. But again, it's inside a closet, so maybe we won't.

In the end, we're very happy that our energy team noticed the small leak and that we could fix it before anything got damaged. If left unfixed, this could have rotted the wood and caused a mold problem. Plus...well...remember that what was leaking was water making its way between the toilet and the sewer... So really that's just nasty and should not be in the walls of our house!

And now, house, please no more excitement and unexpected costs! Kthxbai!