Another Tree Bites the Dust (or, More Accurately, Bites the House)

Just when you think homeownership is getting kinda boring and you start wondering what project to tackle next (deck? kitchen backsplash?) and are just planning to do some dumb maintenance (re-caulk the tub, how exciting), a tree falls on your house.

Let's see that again:

 Hi tree.

Last night a half hour before we put the littlest one down for bedtime, the ground around this tree's roots got too wet to hold it down, so the tree - always slightly angled over our house - plunged into the kids' bedroom. I saw it happen from the dining room window while getting the table set. I heard a whoosh and felt the house shake and looked up in time to see the tree moving (probably on its bounce back from impact).

First we took everyone outside to see if it even looked safe to go upstairs and investigate. When it seemed like the house wasn't going to crumble, I went up to see this:

Fast forward to panicked phone calls to tree companies (this being Friday at 6:30pm...), calls to our home insurance, texts to very helpful neighbors, etc, and by 9pm, we had an emergency tree company here to take it out of our house, in the dark and in the rain.

This cost way more than any of our previous tree removals have cost. But then they came within a few hours, at night, to pull a tree off a house, and pretty much knew we were desperate (the idea of shopping for quotes was not exactly one I was willing to entertain). Hopefully our insurance comes through for us.

Sometime late in the night, we heard shattering. Out went the branch and down came the glass. Here's the view from this morning, with a tarp blocking the window.

So much glass. Clean up was not fun and multi-stage (pick up big pieces, vacuums medium pieces in crummy vacuum, vacuum again with good vacuum, wet mop, etc.)

 Yikes...

Fun side note, for some reason the water that was getting in a floor above was making its way down in drips to the window frame in the office below. Sigh...

This is the other view from this morning - looks like the empty lot next door was good for something. If the trees hadn't been totally cleared away, I'm not actually sure how the crane would have gotten to our back yard to remove our tree. Though I'm still not totally convinced it would have happened if the trees there would have contributed to rain water absorption. (D joked that the tree fell onto that side of the house because it was trying to give us the shade in that room we lost when the 8 trees were removed.)

 The tarp the tree people put up was good, but not good enough. There was no actual seal and we didn't know how long we would have to wait for repairs. A new window pane alone can take a few weeks.

 So today we had a contractor come out to give us an estimate on the repairs and we also paid him to do more dramatic sealing and clearing right away. A team of two spent about 3 hours putting temporary patches on the 3 holes in the roof, removing debris from the window area, and putting up plywood to weatherproof the hole.

 It's not pretty, but at least the kids' room is livable for now. It's Saturday night and no one else is coming until at least Monday. So now we wait...

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.