Grass everywhere!

The cleared area isn't just covered in straw anymore! It's turning green!

As a reminder, here's how it looked a few weeks ago:

We are thrilled. There are some bare patches still, but it's definitely better than we could have ever expected.

On the landscaper's suggestion, we trimmed a few low branches on our oak and magnolia trees too, to let a little more light in (in the case of the magnolia) and just to make things look nice.

It's not much, but do you see a little hint of fall:

Our baby tulip tree is starting to turn into autumn foliage. It's much bigger brothers are starting as well, but that's a bit high for our camera.

Busily doing some work in the house - or actually, breaking things, buying things, and hiring someone else to do them. He comes tomorrow and then I should have some new updates for you. Because, you know, who doesn't love a broken garbage disposal....

To be continued!

Big Project, Big Improvement

We've been quietly getting quote for a big project around here that I haven't told you about. And now that the work is finished, I can show the big reveal. Can you guess what's going on from this picture?

Here's some white space, so I don't spoil any attempts to guess
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We took the plunge and had the back of our lot completely cleared out!

I'll cut right to the before and after pictures and then go into the details:

After 5 years almost exactly (September 15), we finally decided to hire help to clear out our back yard. We were making progress on the smaller sections of overgrowth, like here and here and here (small is relative - they made up a huge portion of the yard). We always wanted to clear away the triangular section in the back. We hired someone in the fall of 2012 to clear it out, but they mostly just hacked it down to the ground, without removing much at the roots. That might have been ok if we had been willing to maintain it, but it grew back so quickly we couldn't keep up. Plus there was a lot of poison ivy and poison sumac in there.

We realized late last month that if we wanted to clear it away and put grass down this year, now was the time to do it (late summer/early fall is the time to put down grass seed). So we scrambled to get some quotes and, despite the high cost, committed to getting this done. After 5 years of saying we would "get to it eventually" we realized that if we hadn't done it before we had a baby, now post-baby we would never get around to it.

I think we made a good decision. It took 4 qualified people almost 2 days to clear everything out. Imagine 2 inexperienced people trying to do it while watching a baby....not gonna happen. First they pulled up everything manually (because they were going to plant grass seed immediately, they couldn't rely on chemicals  - which worked out well because I didn't really want them to use chemicals anyway). 

Originally we planned to leave some ivy under the trees, since it's too shady there for grass. But we decided to have them remove that too, because - as we learned previously - it's hard to maintain ivy and not have it take over. So they got rid of it and put down mulch.

They also got rid of the small tree stump leftover from this project. They didn't take the stumps out from the larger trees - it wasn't worth it since they are in the back corner and would cost a lot to remove.

They brought in some topsoil to level everything out, and then laid down mulch (under trees), grass, and hay. The weather have been very helpful and light sprinkles everyday has meant we haven't had to water yet.

Here are some more before, during, and after pictures taken from our second story.

You can't even see the little wood stove in this picture:

Here we are after day one, before we decided to pulled the additional ivy from the right-side. We're keeping it along the back as a privacy screen from the neighboring parking lot. It ends at a cement pad (which we realized one it was uncovered was a lot bigger than we thought - plenty of room for some lawn furniture), so hopefully that will help control the spreading. Maybe eventually we can plant something back there.

And here's the final picture. Hopefully the grass grows well. We have been seeing a lot of birds back there trying to eat the seeds.

Honestly I don't think we realized how much yard we had. It's been so overgrown since we bought the place that it was hard to visualize. It turns out this is about a third of our yard. It will be nice one the baby is walking to not have to keep her away from that section. And now there's plenty of room for a future swing set!

We also had the landscapers aerate the lawn (the real way, by removing giant plugs, and not by making spikes in the ground like the last people we hired - we were very clear about that), but I wasn't home to get a picture of that, unfortunately. They did the front and the back and then over seeded the front.

The Same But Different

I took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to get to a multi-day project. Our red coffee table clashed with our new red rug and it was hard to find an opportunity to have a few days in a row where we wouldn't miss it in the living room (relatively...).

So out onto the lawn on a tarp, propped up on containers so that I could get to the legs. A quick sand with a medium-fine grit, just to take the shine off.

Then after a quick wipe, it was time for paint! Safety Blue in Rustoleum's High Performance Professional Enamel. I didn't actually buy it for this project - we had some left over from painting the build-in shelves in the nursery.

One coat,

Two coats, three coats:

I followed drying instructions for minimal drying time (you have to spray within an hour or so or wait 48 hours, and no way were we going to make it that long without our table). The top surface was uneven, but no where near as bad as it was when I painted it red. I attribute this to a few things. 1) I was painting over paint and not over whatever was on it the first time. 2) This blue enamel went on much easier, so maybe there is something to this whole "professional" grade stuff. And 3) I cared a whole lot less and didn't dwell on imperfections.

I waited two days and then applied Slate Gray Minwax stain purchased a long time ago for my blue cedar chest. I tried a different technique (also associated with not caring) - I wiped it on and then off the top surface and then dripped it into the crevices of the side edges and legs.

Finally after more waiting, I sprayed the whole things with three thin coats of Minwax Polycrylic spray (one coat, then super-fine sand, then promptly decided that wasn't worth the effort and did coats two and three without sanding). Two more days to cure fully and back it went!

But we weren't idle in the living room while we waited. We took advantage of not having furniture on the rug (or at least not having *much* furniture on the rug) to finally get a rug pad down. First we let it air out in a different room - it stank of chemicals coming out of the packaging. But a day or two later, it was fine and ready to get put under the rug (we had more motivation now that the little one is experimenting with crawling and rolling and banging her head inelegantly against the floor on the way down...)

And so without further ado, here's the new and improved coffee table!

See how the gray is in the details? D actually thought I had painstakingly painted each line, but since stain is so liquidy, I just dripped it in and wiped off the rest.

Honestly I like this even better than the red - better spray paint and better stain technique. Let's hope that's the last time I had to paint this thing, though, because twice is definitely enough.

Day of Labor

Even though I'm not usually someone who makes lists, that to-do list we made a couple of weeks ago made me realize how many smallish things needed to get done around here and pushed me to accomplish some of them. We replaced the light in the office last weekend and now this weekend crossed another off our list (and got started on a different one, but that's a post for another time). 

This Labor Day (and boy, does labor mean something different to me now that I have a baby...), we cleaned out the dryer! It had been about three and a half years and especially given how much more laundry we've been doing these days with a baby, we figured it was probably become quite the fire hazard. We actually had completely forgotten how to do it but fortunately took very good notes on the blog last time and followed them. Step one, of course, was that we unplugged the dryer. Next we had a little trouble getting the bottom of the dryer off, but eventually got it unhinged.

Then we unscrewed the black covering inside, vacuumed, and then unattached it from the vent hose. D dragged out the shop vac and sucked up the dust while using the drill attachment from both ends to send the brush through the vent.

I'm happy to report that it wasn't really all that bad. So we cleaned it the first time a year and a half after moving in, but it had obviously been a lot longer than that since the previous owners cleaned it out (or they never ever cleaned the lint trap?). I think ever three years should definitely be plenty in the future.

The only other unexpected find from this little project? A very very very dead and desiccated mouse stuck to a sticky trap behind the dryer. Don't worry, there'll be no pictures for this one. The trap wasn't even for mice, it was for spider crickets. Poor little thing. Wrong place, wrong time. Though of course if he'd made it upstairs our cat would have been waiting...

EXTERMINATE!!!!!

Like the Daleks, can you really destroy English Ivy? Well, yes you can. But if you tolerate it near your house it will continually attempt to overtake it. 

Eventually we will remove all of the ivy, but it is useful to to hold our soil in place until we have a better plan.

So every year we need to rip it off of our walls. 

Tiffany's, but no little blue box

Check one off the list - our office has a beautiful new light fixture. Bonus points because the wiring up there wasn't all that scary (old houses always make the smallest upgrades into a suspenseful thriller, because there's no telling what's waiting - especially with electrical work). Step one was to find a lamp that we liked. It would be easy, we thought, to replace the ugly generic lamp that was there when we bought the house. I realized I never took a picture of the old fixture, even looking way back in the blog archives. Well here it is, sitting on our table, ready to be retired:

After at least 20 minutes of searching at stores like Crate and Barrel, West Elm, Pier 1, and World Market, we realized it might be a difficult thing to find. We wanted the bulbs to be covered and we wanted something interesting that also actually produced light (as opposed to mood lighting that wouldn't actually illuminate the room). Fortunately we went back to the basics and found one semi-flushmount light at Lowes. D remarked: "that looks kinda nice," I agreed, and 5 minutes later it was ordered for local in-store pick-up. We were all in favor of quick, decisive action.

The next afternoon, we picked up the fixture and by that night, had it installed. No sense in letting it sit around.

The instructions were actually so misleading that we quickly went off-book (seriously, it had the step about putting the decorative plate on before even attaching the base to the ceiling, it made no sense. Step one was actually tricky - threading all 3 wires through the tube and the nut was a very tight fit.

The other problem we ran into was that the electric box on the ceiling was a circle that was plastered in place and protruded a little, which stopped us from getting the new fixture flush with the ceiling. The decorative nuts did not allow us to tighten it enough even to get it to stop wiggling. D ingeniously added an extra nut to let us tighten the fixture. You can see it's still not totally flush to the ceiling, but it is flush to the electrical box and is much more stable now. Of course we notice it, but no one else ever will. And probably in a few days we won't either. It looks much better now - at first D used a rusty nut but when we realized how visible it was, he found one in a matching brushed nickel finish.

Fortunately those were our only complications. The wires, mercifully, were not too surprising. Old and cloth-covered, yes, but at least there was a white and a black and everything went back into place. And so without further ado, here is the newest addition to our home decor - the Portfolio 13-in Tiffany Style lamp:

And thankfully, it does what it was supposed to and fit the new LED bulbs wonderfully. Here it is illuminated:

We love it and our only regrets are that we don't use the room more often and that we didn't replace it sooner. Might be time to replace the kitchen lamp as well. It's ok, but now it seems awfully boring.

Random question before I sign off - we're shopping around for faucets for the bathroom and wondered if anyone knew what brands are good and what to steer clear of. We were mostly looking at Kohler and Moen because we thought they were well-made. Delta has some pretty ones, but we've never used them before. Suggestions? The only thing we do know from the bathroom remodel was to buy them from fancier places, because the versions sold by Lowes and Home Depot tend to use cheaper plastic parts. Someone recommended faucet.com because we don't have anywhere convenient to shop in person.

So Much To Do, So Little Time

In the last post I mentioned a growing to-do list. Though I usually post our to-do lists around our home-buying anniversary, I thought I'd share with you some of the things I'd like to work on while it's fresh in my head. So here is the list, one month early- nothing major (the windows were our major planned fix for the year) but we definitely need to do some upkeep. Here they are in approximate order of importance/likelihood of getting done:

• Repaint the coffee table. Now that the rug is red, we have to make the table blue so it does clash in a weird, kind-of-matches-but-doesn't way.

• Clean out the dryer vent. It's been over 3 years, yikes!

• Mix up some quikrete to treat some loose areas in our stone walkway
  

• Stop the drip in our main bathroom sink. It's driving me crazy. We leave a contained underneath and use the water for our houseplants, but it is so annoying - especially because this is the sink that guests use and the container above the drain stops air from getting to the drain so it is always damp and moldy. I think this will require a new faucet, but we want to get one from a better store than a Home Depot or Lowes (even though they have the same brands as fancy stores, the parts are cheaper - i.e. plastic instead of ceramic) and we haven't had time to look into where to go or what to buy. I'm especially looking forward to having hot and cold knobs that are oriented correctly (they should point parallel to the faucet when they are on, not when they are off).

• Some light fixture updates: we switched the bulbs in our office to LEDs but they are too big now for the old fixture. We didn't like it anyway...
  

• Power wash the siding (we have no excuses - my parents loaned/gave us their power washer).

• Replace the outside lights - the one at the end of the walkway (now that it works, yay!), the one beside the front door, and the one over the garage (which we never ever use). They are the cheapest, most standard looking ones available and I'd really like to buy fancy ones. (You know what are really cool? The gas lamp ones. Of course we don't actually have a gas line to the house, so those are not an option.)

• Make the basement pretty. This is a big project that involves replacing our pantry shelves with something that nice (like these Fjalkinge shelves by Ikea), painting the wall that the fireplace is on, which still has a spot of bare drywall from our furnace woes three years ago, and maybe buying some spiffy new furniture (I would love to get rid of our college futon but still have a place for people to sleep).

• Door replacements, eventually. Last year I said one of the priorities for this year would be a new basement door and new doorways for the hallway.

How much can we realistically get done with a little one around the house just starting to be mobile and curious? Probably not much. But one can always hope.

Clever packaging

Lowes has some pretty clever packaging. I was confused when this arrived - wondered if it was some weird brand logo.

 But then this box showed up (baby for scale) - a castle?

Yes! A castle! Because who doesn't love to have make-believe adventures using large shipping boxes. I remember some of my best childhood memories are from the time when my parents bought a chest freezer and I made a house out of the giant box.

 If you can't see it clearly, it says "Lords, knights, ladies - the royal family doth summon thee to the palace, forthwith. Yea, verily! Just as King Arthur pulled the sword from the stone, freest thou the castle from this box to create thine own cardboard Camelot. Wield thy sword with care so that no wound may befall thy fair skin." At the top of the box, it says "THANK YOU. We hope you enjoy your order as much as your box."

What was in the boxes? An outdoor rug for our patio and a large flower pot, both from the parents.

They bought us the flower pot in order to make an umbrella stand but we are far too lazy and instead, are keeping an eye on a pretty cantilever one from Home Depot in the hopes that it goes on sale as the season comes to an end (sorry Lowes, you have cute packaging but don't make a model that we like).

It worked out well though, because we've been slowly increasing the pot size for a willow branch that we planted. It's getting bigger and bigger and we hope that if it survives the winter on our windowsill, it will find a permanent home next spring when we plant it outside.

You may have noticed some sticks on our table in the above picture of our patio? What is it? A sawed-off mulberry tree! After we got some help identifying the second of two baby trees growing in our yard, we decided the tulip tree was the winner and cut the mulberry off. We still have to cut it down further. Seemed like the remains will make decent kindling.

A few more gratuitous yard pictures - our lilies and black-eyed susans are very happy (finally!). This fall we have to actually thin out our garden. I can't believe it!

The weather has just been too nice to do much work lately. We've been out enjoying ourselves. The blog will pick back up soon - we have a growing to-do list.