'Tis the Season

It's spring, so that means we're out in the yard every chance we get. The really awful bugs haven't come out yet and it's lovely and not too humid. So of course we garden.

This year, we have the addition of the vegetable garden to get ready (mostly by Grandma but with a little physical labor from D). The walls went up last fall and so Grandma got to work rototilling the ground and getting it ready for planting.

To our surprise, she also put down a landscaping cloth, to help keep the weeds out. Nothing I've ever used on a vegetable garden before, but she's the expert. We'll see how it turns out.

At the same time that she was getting the plot cleared, we got 3 cubic yards of compost, both to fill the garden and to help with other areas around the yard. After D brought 13 wheelbarrow's worth of compost to the garden (there's that physical labor part I mentioned), it was ready for planting all the seedlings that had been growing in our picture window for the last month.

We have two little additions to our garden to keep watch over it and make sure that the animals keep out. They'll probably be pretty dingy and sun-bleached by the end of the season but for now they're looking chipper and ready for action.

With the vegetables planted, it's time to move onto other things. The weeds have truly taken over our flower beds. To the point where we aren't even sure where to begin on removing them. We're starting with the front flower beds, since those are the ones most visible to the neighbors (and also the less weedy, so they seem more manageable). Remember when liriope was our only problem? Seems like there's a new intrusive weed every year.

At the rate we're going, I'd say I have maybe 3 more good weekends of outdoor time before retreating indoors. And we probably only have about 6 month's worth of gardening that needs doing. Hm....that doesn't quite work out, does it?

First steps to a shed

So we know we want a shed (though we're not totally sure anymore if we're getting one this year - thanks taxes...). And we know we want it on the already existing concrete pad at the back of the house. The problem is, there's a brick oven back there, firmly rooted in place. I was loath to get rid of it because it really is cute and something I always said we would use "one day." But approaching 10 years in this house and no plans to ever make something of it, D was not so sentimental. He considered it an obstacle to getting our long-desired storage. So down it came.

Over the course of the last three weeks or so, he took it apart piece by piece. This was the starting point:

With a chisel and a mallet, he managed to free large blocks of masonry. At first, he tried to go brick by brick, but realized that they would never break down so neatly. So instead, he went for manageable chunks:

 The chimney/tower part, down on the ground:

 More of the base removed:

 As the brick oven came down, the debris pile went up...

 Until finally the debris pile was all that remained.

Here's another view, with the oven scraped away, including the masonry at the bottom that glued it in place on the concrete. We still have the debris and may slowly bring it to the curb on trash day. We considered building up the walls around our soon-to-be vegetable garden, until D did some reading and learned that these blocks could have asbestos in them - at last the inner ones that contained the hottest part of the oven. Better safe than sorry - certainly not something we want as a retaining wall holding in the soil that is growing our summer veggies.

Next up, deciding if we are going to buy this year or not and working on the permitting if so.

Spring is has arrived, slowly but surely, and we're getting in lots of time outside in the yard. First up was our snowdrops, well after the last snows but still arriving while it was quite cold. Our neighbor gave these to us and they really cheer up the area at the side of the house where we keep our garabage bins.

Lumberjack - with POWER!

We found a neighbor with a power tool. Life is good. Most of the time D cuts down a tree, or cuts a fallen tree into pieces, he uses a hand saw. It's not that we're against power tools. It's just that we keep thinking it isn't worth buying one because "we won't get much use out of it." Experience is proving otherwise, though I still keep thinking, "OK, but this is the LAST ONE." Trees take note. Please stop falling.

But now we are flush with good fortune of knowing where to locate a chainsaw without having to buy one on our own. And so in our first rain-free weekend day of the year (maybe not, but it sure feels like it), D got to work. It went so quickly! Within an hour, the tree went from this:

To this:

He even took a couple of inches off of the stump near the soon-to-be vegetable garden. Still not invisible, certainly, but at least it's a little less prominent now.

The yard is still so wet that we have to wear rain boots and you can hear them squelch with every step. It is so wet, in fact, that the whole where the almost nonexistent root ball was is now a hole full of water that's not going down. Here it is on Saturday:

And here it is on Monday.

I think we will need several weeks of dry weather (not likely to happen) for the water table to go down. How deep is the hole. At least deeper than my preschooler's rain boots, as we learned when she fell right into the hole after poking it with sticks. 

In other tree news, one of the trees we planted in fall of 2017 is not looking great. We wrapped it up this past fall because the deer were ruining the bark. We unwrapped it this month because we were afraid with all the wet weather that it would stay too moist and start rotting. And so this is the state of the tree bark. Too soon to see if it will have an effect on the tree itself - nothing is budding yet. The branches seem alive and happy so far (as much as they can be in winter), but if there are any tree experts that can give us advice on what to do next, please let us know. I want this beautiful maple to survive.

Shed-ding our Stuff

One project we've toyed with that I forgot to include in our outdoor goals for 2019 is constructing a shed. Even though I forgot to mention it, it's actually the thing we are most likely to do this year. Especially now that we're going to have a vegetable garden, it would be nice to have access to our gardening tools without having to go all the way to the garage at the front of the house. We have decided nothing at this point, and are looking to our reader (all one of you) for suggestions.

First, placement. We already have this concrete pad that seems perfect. We would have to destroy the wood burning stove (that we never used) and move the sandbox, but otherwise, it's ready. The problem is that it measures 7' x 15' and a common width for sheds seems to be 8'. We don't know enough about what kind of base a shed entails, so we are trying to figure out if some of it can overhang off the pad (i.e. put the foundation blocks about 6-12 inches back under the base).  Adding to the concrete pad sounds extreme (rebar and stuff we don't really want to do). We know we want something a bit sturdier and more "house-like" than the fiberglass one-piece ones from Home Depot or Lowes, but that's all we know so far. To our surprise, from what we can figure out, it doesn't look like we will need a county permit, and maybe not a town one either (locals, feel free to weigh in**edited to add that I found our town permitting forms at last and we do indeed need at least a town permit.**) based on the size we're looking at (8' x 12' probably). Beyond that, we're clueless.

In a related matter, our yard is under water like never before. We have had so much rain that the ground everywhere is muddy mush, and some of it, like here, actually has standing water on it. I'm relieved our yard is graded away from our house. (This further convinces us that the shed has to be standing up above the concrete pad, that's for sure.)

The last time it was this wet - and windy as it has been on some days - we had the big tree fall on our house. I feel like I'm holding my breath these days every time we get..."weather."

Indoor 2019 Goals

This year, with no time to actually do anything, my goal nonetheless is to continue on my quest for organization. Two disastrous closets remain, and I would love to turn them into something pretty.

The first is in the basement, under the stairs. It is a catch-all for wrapping paper and accessories, a steam vacuum, the cat carrier, some tennis rackets, and who knows what else. The shelves are attached and I feel like the real problem here is not the closet itself, but finding other homes for some of this junk and shopping IKEA and the Container Store to find solutions to categorize and corral the junk. Since it's usually just out of sight/out of mind, I like to forget that this mess is down there. But it's probably time to do something about it.

The bigger closet disaster is harder to forget, because I go in there at least every week or two for clean sheets and towels. Our linen closet, at the top of the stairs, was never a beauty, but after the additional duct work that was installed in 2015, we just utterly gave up even pretending to have a system. I might finally have gotten to the point where I can't handle it anymore.

So here's the problem. Both these goals, plus the "reach" goal of a deck/patio, were our house goals for last year, too (and, in some cases, even the year before).  Oh well, it's still good to have goals.

Um....thanks?

Last week, I told you how one of the goals for our year was to remove this tree:

Fast forward to today and...

Here's another view, if it's not obvious what happened. Evidently, windy, wet weather has struck again.

It's concerning that yet another tree has spontaneously fallen in our yard, though fortunately this one fell in the right direction to avoid hitting anything. And we knew it was weak and sickly, so the fact that it had almost no root structure (or maybe there is some down there but it rotted at the base?) isn't that surprising:

Honestly, this is one more thing off our to-do list. So...thanks, Mother Nature. I guess. Now could some beavers come through and cut it up into pieces for us? That'd be great.

Seriously though, should I start being afraid of those trees in our yard?

Low Expectations

Oh loyal reader, the only one left. You may have noticed that the volume of posts dropped significantly after July. It's not just the posting - it's also the work around the house. What changed? Well to briefly touch on our family life, something I usually avoid in this post, our oldest stopped napping on weekends. That precious time was our perfect time to tackle small (or even large) project. And blog about them. But that is a thing of the past and we now often use that time to do non-house-related things.

And so with that in mind, it's time to talk about 2019 projects and goals, and we're keeping our expectations small. For example, it took us 2 months just to hang this flower lamp in the kids' room. It required finding the right size screw and using a drill. Not exactly challenging. But it's up, better late than never.

Without further ado, I'm going to cover our outside goals in this post.

Goal 1: cut down this tree:

It's pretty much totally dead and we're just biding our time until we manage to finagle a chainsaw from a friend. D is sick of cutting down trees with hand saws.

Relatedly, we want to get rid of this tree stump, or at least level it to the ground (you may have noticed these pictures were not taken on the same day):

 Ongoing goal: continue to combat ivy in all its forms:

Here's the view of our backyard again, so I can tell you about our unlikely reach goals for the year. D's next big "hire someone for a major home improvement" level project would be to convert this brick patio into a full on raised deck. I'm not convinced it's worth the effort, but I've been wrong before (it was also his idea to convert our 3-season breezeway into the sun room). We also really need to eventually try to create some kind of intentional garden along the back fence, instead of letting it go to seed every summer and fill with leaves in the fall that we're too lazy to drag to the curb.

Before I leave you, possibly for another month given my current blogging pace, I thought I'd share this lovely picture of the decorative grasses that really seem to have perked up since we planted them this summer.

Merry Everything!

Our decorations this year, by night (because it was night by the time we took the pictures and I'm sure I won't have time to do it tomorrow). Mostly the same as last year, but still worth photographing.  We inherited a few more outdoor ornaments. I think our house looks best at the moment in the daytime. We still haven't quite nailed the lighting, but the candy canes, window wreaths, and hanging ornaments look very festive during the light when they're most visible.

The whole scene, this year with more hanging ornaments (and less snow, sadly):

I so badly wanted to put lights on the tree that's on the right, the one that looks exactly like a Christmas tree. We strung up our white lights that we used to use along our gutters but apparently those don't want to light up anymore. Hopefully I can snag a new set on sale so I can light it up next year. Instead, we put up some candy cane ornaments, so I think it still gets the point across.

Now could it please just snow a little? Really that's the best decoration I can think of.

A bit chilly

A few years ago, (6, to be exact) we installed a Nest thermostat as our main heating thermostat. We installed another when we added the sun room. They're only hooked up to our heat, so we don't use them for a good chunk of the year when we switch to air conditioning. But December is decidedly time for heat.

The problem is that the Nest keeps trying to be too smart. We set up a schedule where it should be warm when we get home from work, but to conserve energy, we also set up auto-away. This results in a house that knows when we are gone and therefore does not turn on the heat to greet us. This is what usually greets me at the end of the day.

And our house is so slow to heat up that this basically means we reach ideal temperature right at bedtime. So...not great.

One option would be to turn off auto-away, but of course that's there to help save energy. The next option would be to try out auto-scheduling. I think we tried it out back when we first got it but we didn't like the choices it made. But perhaps if it starts to notice what time we get home in the afternoon, it can start warming the house up in advance in time to reach an appropriate temperature by dinner. We haven't wanted to try it yet, as we enter the unpredictable holiday season, but it's something we plan to attempt in January.

Another frustrating problem with our heating - and this one isn't actually the Nest's fault - is where we have our heating systems. The first one, above, is in the hallway. We do often walk by there, but not as often as, say, the living room. And so it doesn't always *know* we are home even when we are (the whole notion of the Internet of Things is creepy, but this isn't the place to address it).

The other thermostat, which we had installed in our new room, is even worse. Look at this crazy low temperature! Why let the room drop to 58? 

Well, it isn't actually that cold in there. Without realizing what that would mean for the temperature readings, we chose to put this one on an exterior wall. And it turns out that even with decent new insulation, the wall itself is pretty chilly. So we basically just ignore this thermostat completely since it's not a true reading of the temperature in the room, and just let the other one make the heating decision. Not the best choice but we had no idea at the time.

Even when everything is working perfectly, we tend to keep our house just a little chilly (friends sometimes wear coats inside). So the fact that it's cold even for us is probably bad. But doesn't being colder burn calories or something?

Deer me!

We had to dress our baby trees. Deer have been rutting and destroying the delicate bark of the trunk. I forgot to take a "before" picture of the two trees now covered up, but here is an example of a third, a tulip tree, that still needs wrapping. Stupid deer. Eating our bulbs and hostas and now this:

Both our precious new maples are now sporting these lovely plastic wraps to help protect them. Hopefully there's no permanent damage.

In other yard news, besides the constant battle with leaves, we have begun setting up for a vegetable garden! While this isn't exactly planting season, we figured it was a good time to start turning over the soil and building the gates (to protect from bunnies and deer as noted above).  This is really more a project for grandma and her grandbabies, so D and I didn't even have to do much of the work! Here you can see some straight lines made of string to help get the fencing straight followed by the completed garden. We also rototilled some of the soil, though we'll do another round this spring and have a truckload of compost delivered to help fertilize the area. I can't wait to send the kids out to bring back a crop.

And finally, we have new decorative grasses growing along our property line, also from grandma. They looked totally dead when we planted them (you can still see the brown dead grass blades), but the green grass and fronds popped out when we weren't paying attention and they are very much alive. We're hoping it forms a fence of sorts to separate us from the empty lot and give our backyard some privacy from the street.