The Lot, Post 1: A Lot of Nothing

Some background: we live next to an empty lot. It was owned by someone out of state who never took care of it and who had never, as far as we've seen, visited it. It's created some fun times like when we have to have our town file violations and then come chop down the foot-tall grass, or when we have to shovel the sidewalk every winter. It was an ugly overgrown mess but at least it provided us with shade and a hope that perhaps one day we could unite it with our property and turn it into a proper yard.

Then it went on the market and, many months later, sold. Abruptly afterwards, the trees got tattooed.

The writing was on the wall or, at least, on the trees. Neighbors got together to try to get the town to step in and refuse to permit the tall, beautiful trees to be cut. For reasons I'll get into in future posts perhaps, we and our neighbors think that there may be permitting issues later and that the lot may not, in the end, be able to have a house on it. So we wanted one simple thing - don't remove trees that are decades (or more!) old before you know if you can actually use the property.

No dice. And so what follows are some pretty depressing before and after photos.

Here's the lot, with our house on the edge of the picture.

 And here it is two days later.

Here's the view out the second floor bedroom window (the one you can see from the pictures above):

Needless to say, we had to put up room darkening curtains. I'm pretty sure the lack of shade on our roof will raise our electric bill significantly as well.

 Here's the view from our house to our neighbors on the other side of the lot:

 And here it is now.

It's a good thing we like our neighbors.

If this lot actually gets developed, I plan to blog it as a side note here, just because seeing a house go up next to ours could be really interesting.

Or the new owner will decide the lot isn't buildable and we'll be left with this ugly eyesore and none of the redeeming beautiful trees.

Oh deer!

Last fall after our rope hammock pretty much disintegrated, I splurged on this beautiful blue Hammaka 2-person hammock (more like one adult plus one-to-two squirmy children):

I liked it so much I even remembered to take it in in the winter.

It made it through spring and half of summer beautifully - the colors hadn't faded yet despite being in the sun pretty much from 11am to sunset. I actually enjoyed sitting in it (when it was 95 and humid out there). And then this week we noticed this when we went outside:

Multiple individually ripped ropes and even some nibbles to the cloth itself. What the heck! The only thing we can think of is deer. Did it need more fiber in its diet?

I'm curious for suggestions on what I can do to prevent this. I really want to buy another but at $65 each, I'm not on the market for deer food. Nor am I willing to bring it in nightly. Please help!

(Our neighbor's solution to the deer problem in his garden - assuming that's what it is in this case - was to apply for a permit to build an extra high fence. While I would like to enjoy my hammock in peace, I'm not quite that desperate.)

Painted House 2

First, we had our house painted. And then, we had our house painted again. On paper. Isn't it beautiful. Now we just have to find it a frame and a place to live.

Insert Funny Joke About Stripping Here

I could have come up with a clever title, but on this minimal amount of sleep, I'm just impressed I'm posting an update at all. Now that our garage door is pretty, it was time to put new weather-stripping on the bottom. Even though the garage isn't climate controlled, it shares a wall with a room that is, so might as well keep out as much outside air as possible. Plus whatever animals might be sneaking in under the door (as opposed to lots of other ways they probably find to come in). The old one was cracked and starting to fall off--

 The nails holding the strips in place seemed unnecessarily gigantic.

 About 12 nails later, the old weather strip was off!

And within about a half hour (helped by a second pair of hands),  ta-dah! It's so pretty! Time for the animals to find a new way to sneak into the garage.

Basil Surprise

A friend gave us some basil with the promise that it might actually re-seed itself every year, so rather than plant it in a pot with the rest of our basil, we decided to plant it around one of our trees, like we did a few years ago with our mint. Easy, we thought. Clear out some grass and weeds, dig some holes, split and plant.

Clear around the tree. Check. Dig dig dig - hm....the shovel isn't going through the soil anymore. It's not too dry, so what's in the way?

Landscaping cloth, the bane of my existence. D goes for the big shovel and scissors and starts digging and ripping. He finally dislodges most of it.

 OK, time to dig a hole for the basil again and...what's that? A brick?

 Another brick? And another brick? And another brick?

 Thirteen bricks!?!? What used to be around that tree? I wish I had some idea what the previous owners were thinking? Is there a whole patio under the grass? Maybe a secret passage?

Over an hour later - BASIL! Now hopefully we don't kill it with our less than successful gardening record. But hey, at least we managed to harvest some bricks.

On a totally unrelated note but just to document it - take a look at our ceiling in the new ("sun") room. See anything? No? Well that's good because this is the "after" picture - yet again, we got something fixed before I managed to take the "before." After a few months of cold, warm, dry, humid, etc. changes, the ceiling and the edge of the crown molding had developed a visible separation. This week the team that built the room came in to caulk it so it's totally invisible now.

Painted House

We decided it was about time to give the outside of our house a new coat of paint. It wasn't going to be a very dramatic change (and usually I paint BECAUSE I want dramatic change) but was going to require a ton of prep work. We know because we tried this before, and never got very far.

Of course a lot of the worst parts were covered up with vinyl flashing when we replaced our windows - most new window installations now include vinyl and aluminum capping to cover the whole exterior sill. But still we needed a lot of scraping and rebuilding.

Here's an example of a spot we tried to build up that still needed a lot of work:

And here is paint to be scraped. To the left next to the rough patch is where we tried to fix 7 years ago. Even after all this time, I can still see the "ultra" white right out of the un-tinted can and how it's different from the color around it.

In the back, you can see the difference between our older "new" windows (not as old as the originals but installed before we moved in, sometime in the 90s or early 00s, where there is still exposed sill in need of help:

Versus the ones we replaced in 2014 where the sills are fully covered:

Here's the basement door, that I desperately want to replace, but that we figured was worth painting for the time being (at least it will match until I finally get a new one - especially since I've wanted a new one for years and so who knows when I'll actually get around to it):

This blog post has been mostly delayed while I go through old photos trying to find a "before" picture for the garage, which I apparently forgot to photograph before last week's painting. It was the most dramatic transformation but you'll have to take my word for it since it seems like I have no photographic evidence. Here's my thousand words, in place a picture - a cream color that matched no other exterior color, a lock that had been removed and had the hole filled in with peach-colored putty, and a door panel that was bowed out and cracked. In short, a pretty ugly sight to see (but not one worth replacing, based on the high cost estimates for a new door).

And now the afters:

A garage that actually matches the white color of our new addition, with no weird peach-colored putty. The bottom left panel is still bowed out, but the painter was able to fill in the cracks and leave it mostly unnoticeable (and at a fraction of the price of a new door):

Rebuilt, primed, and painted area under the soffit:

Scraped and painted picture window:

Freshly white area around the front door (he's actually coming back this week to give our blue front door a fresh coat as well):

 Back window sills:

 Basement door (when he comes back to do the front door, he'll go over the panes with a razor):

Since we were giving the house a nice whitening refresh, it seemed like a good time to power wash as well. We have one power washer that needs the O ring replaced, and we borrowed a neighbors that also didn't have quite enough oomph to safely get to our upper floors. So since the painter had to scrub and clean the wood areas to prepare them for painting, he also was willing to power wash the siding areas as well. Here's a before and after. Obviously his power washer had a bit more, well, power. Also he actually used some detergent, which we didn't. Green slime:

No more green slime:

A nice, relatively cheap refresh for our house that has been much needed all these years. We probably should have done it sooner! And now we have a guy to call for similar jobs, and who we'll be recommending to all our local friends.

Back from the Brink

This post has an alternate title of "My Husband is Awesome" which is maybe poorly timed for a *mothers day* weekend post. But yet again my husband has brought our laundry appliance back from near death. In 2014, the washing machine stopped agitating. In 2015, our dryer stopped heating. After apparently a year's hiatus, it was time for another problem. For a few weeks, the washing machine spun so aggressively and out of balance that I thought it would bounce its way across the basement floor. I went down several times a load to try to rearrange our wet laundry, but it never seemed to help. 

After a little reading and YouTube research, D was ready to take the whole thing apart and try to diagnose it himself. First, the top panel:

 Then all the rest:

At last, the problem! The hook (circled in red) that attached a spring between the drum and the frame had been attached at a spot that was totally rusted through (arrow) and was now freely hanging. So nothing was restraining the drum from banging all around when it was spinning.

What to do? Drill a new hole next to the hold one and reattach the spring, of course. And so in a half hour, with 0 cost, our washing machine is back in tip top shape.* Yay for handy husbands!

* I mean, as tip top as a rusty old washing machine can be. I know it's just a matter of time before there's something we can't fix. But I adore my totally dumb, manual mechanic appliance and will be so sad when we finally have to buy a new fangled "smart" one.

Markers as a Home Improvement Tool

One sign of the fact that we are now far from new homeowners is that things we replaced are already starting to look old or damaged. One example - the hinge of a toddler step stool managed to scrape away stain (and some wood) from our relatively new bathroom cabinets.

Fancy markers to the rescue! This kit, found by my mom who always finds clever gadgets and gizmos, claimed to fix chips and scrapes in wood with wood-colored markers. I don't think the ink is anything special but it is basically a nice set of markers in various shades of brown.

 Here it is, with one or two rounds of the darkest brown:

And here it is again, with another round of brown and black the following, wiped and blended a bit together:

Is it invisible? Not at all. The wood itself got scraped away so without some really dramatic fix with wood filler, the slash will still be there. And the markers can't quite replicate the same level of glossiness. But from standing (or sitting - it is a bathroom after all) eye level, it's barely there unless you look for it, so at least I'm not haunted by that step stool each and every time I use the bathroom.

New Amsterdam

It's that time of year again, when I take random pictures of flowers in our yard to show you how much progress we've made on our quest to continue to find variety and color all season long. This year, a new addition - tulips from the Netherlands. And while we are no Holland (I think we planted about 15 bulbs), I'm pleased to report they all appear to be coming up beautifully. Because we bought some fancy assortments, these are no ordinary tulips. They are variegated, and frilly and giving us some lovely early spring color - they even beat the azaleas to bloom this year. So far we've had snowdrops, cherry blossom, and camellias, and now tulips and phlox:

 These two pictures were taken just 12 hours apart - the purple one really opened up quickly!

We should have a few more varieties blooming soon - I think in all we have 3 or 4 varieties, all with slightly different peak seasons.

Also this year we ordered a giant pile of dirt to start filling in low areas. You can see we are making progress with it already:

We used a lot to fill in some low and bare patches in the backyard and also help build up the new front garden. I never got around to posting an update about this area last year (in fact, I even lost the pictures I took at that time). This is the garden we created when we built the new room and converted the front door there into a wall. We connected some black plastic garden boarder, put in some of the new tulip bulbs, and split and moved some irises. We moved a butterfly bush and are hoping it will grow high and blossom to provide a little privacy and cover up that oh-so-white wall. At any rate, it is not dead and has lots of green leaves on it. This spring I still have to add a few black-eyed Susans and then I think it will all fill in and be completely unnoticeable as "new."

Another random project from last fall was making a pretty and much less muddy area for water to drain near our driveway. Visiting family took an interest and gathered up scattered bricks to build a lovely drainage area near our sewer grate (the weed cloth didn't end up getting used).

 Isn't it great? A small touch that really reduces soil runoff.

A lot more work to be done outside, and all before it gets too hot and buggy. Fingers crossed we have a mild (and wet) spring to get everything planted and watered.