Ring! Ring! ...Hello?

In a few weeks, my doorbell will have been dead for 3 years. It doesn't seem like something worth keeping track of, but I miss it. I miss it every time I have to replace the piece of tape I put on top to discourage people from pressing the bell and waiting, assuming that we are on our way. I miss it in the evening when I come home and there's no little orange glowing button. I miss it every time I have to text or email someone: "Just knock, because the doorbell doesn't work."

Well no more. After 3 years of not wanting to pay for an electrician to come rewire it, we decided to take a different approach. We paid Jeff Bezos to fix the problem instead, recently adding a ring to our ever-increasing amount of Amazon products in our lives (we're not happy about it, but we've come to love our lord and master).

We'd been waffling for about a year on it (in part because of our reluctance to buy more Amazon products) but after seeing one at a friend's house, we decided it was the cheapest, easiest solution to my sad doorbell problem. And it was incredibly quick. D and the girls even managed to install it in the rain in about a half hour (it probably would have been quicker without the "help" of small children). The kit included an adorably small level and several inserts to angle the device. We didn't end up needing to tilt it, screwing it directly into the door frame. The only question really was whether to use the gray metallic faceplate or the black one.

We chose the black face plate instead of the gray metallic one since at least it matches our shutters. It is linked to our echo to tell us when "someone is at the door" and offers some motion detection as well, which is nice for when a package goes missing or to make sure the cat sitter remembered to pay us a visit. Most important for me, it makes an audible chime for the person at the other end pressing the doorbell. It's the little things, I guess. The kids find it hilarious and love to ring it every time they come in. We get a fun video on our phones.

Despite this unneeded extra use, we've been impressed with the battery life so far (you can hardwire it in but our original problem was that we don't have electricity to the doorbell). It's not totally flush with our door frame because it was a bit wider than the space between the trim, but it looks great. From above, you can still get a peek at our sad little doorbell. But at least now it isn't confusing visitors.

Dead wood

Last fall, we noticed that our one-year-old maple trees were being ripped apart by rutting deer. We took action quickly by wrapping them in plastic tubing. Well, sadly, we were too late, at least for the one in the back yard. After 18 months in its new home, it is dead as a doornail. Or a dead tree. We looked up about a week and a half ago and realized that it was not well:

 Yeah...that doesn't look right.

Here's another picture of the bark - I guess despite covering it up at this stage, too much of the infrastructure had been damaged. We are so bummed. That tree had such beautiful red fall foliage and was one we planted in the hopes of one day re-developing our tree canopy, after losing so many trees in our back yard.

It isn't helping that nearly every time the kids play outside, they find another pile of deer poop that we have to shovel up.

Fortunately the other maple in the front seems to have recovered:

And rather than dwell on our sad dead tree, here's our lovely summer garden at the moment. We have black-eyed susans (though sparser than last year on one side of the yard for some reason),  some echinacea/coneflowers and Russian sage.

Here are some surprisingly happy red and pink roses, despite my utter lack of effort:

And new this year, a hibiscus plant we bought last summer, probably as an impulse purchase at Home Depot or something. The flowers are huge - toddler hand for scale:

One tree, all things considered, is not too bad. But I'm still beginning to hate the deer fouling our yard.

Desk organization

My desk was a disaster. I didn't take a before picture of the whole thing because it had lots of stuff I would have to "fuzz" out, but trust me when I say there were just piles of papers - some that needed permanent filing, some that needed addressing (i.e. bills, summer kindergarten assignments), some that needed surreptitious trashing (children's art). I have still been using the mesh wall hanger that you can see in this picture from during our remodel. Except that because we now have a backsplash, I have been keeping it propped up against the wall, precariously balanced. All the papers theoretically go in there, but without a way to organize them and because the whole thing keeps falling, I also end up just stacking things in piles. I almost lost a gift card in the stack. I was constantly worried I would miss one of our few paper bills. It was getting bad.

I have shelves built in above the desk area, but the size of all the cubbies makes it hard to do anything practical with them. So filling the space I have, I stockpile folded up receipts, expired meds for the next give-back day, $1 bills for my daughter's allowance, old greeting cards, etc. But no full sized papers - which is the one thing that I seem to accumulate. It was time to make this a more usable space.

It was clear that these were assembled as two "H"-shaped units, so we thought (hoped!) that removing one of them would leave everything else unharmed. We used a keyhole saw and started sawing into one side of the structure.

 A little more, and then a little more than that, working in slow chunks:

When we got enough of the vertical pieces out, the rest came out pretty easily. Still the whole thing was slow going, since we didn't want to ruin any of the finish.

Then we were left with the nails sticking out from below. We managed to hammer a couple of them out from the top. D leveled the others with a dremel.

The shelf looks smooth and evenly stained without the inner structure, fortunately, as expected. You would never know the letter-holder-sized organizer was ever there.

Here it is now, with two document trays stacked inside, purchased after careful measuring. The shelf is about 11'' deep - an annoyingly precise depth that meant that while a paper could fit in there long-wise (so that the 8.5'' side faced out), an organizer slightly LARGER than a paper would stick out (most of the document trays were 12-14'' long). So I opted to buy trays that are open on the long side, though that meant less real estate inside the shelf. I was able to squeeze two in there, because while the clearance was only 4.5'' to the top lip, beyond that first half inch, inside was almost 6'' high.

It's not perfect of course - I'm still a victim of my own flawed organizational skills. But I have two distinct full-sized shelves, plus a couple of folders, to sort papers. It definitely makes the space more helpful for the types of things I actually need to store there.

Meanwhile (as you can see from the bottom right corner of the photo above), I'm still using the once-upon-a-time-wall-mounted organizer. I had purchased a version matching the document trays that would actually stand up on a flat base, but it turned out to be envelope-sized, rather than full-sized. And that was exactly the size that I *don't* actually need to help me organize. So I need a similar item that would hold normal 8.5x11'' paper. I haven't been able to find one - so please let me know if you come across something.

As usual, we've been so busy around the house that I've had trouble finding time to post. But I have a few projects lined up to talk about. AND we are filing our shed permit paperwork TODAY. So more on that soon as well.

And it was all yellow

It turns out that construction paper, when wet, is great at transferring dye. It makes sense, in retrospect, but definitely was not something I would have thought about when my kids went for a cup of water while coloring last weekend. But oh yes, there is quite a lot of dye in that paper. An hour after said coloring, we walked into the sunroom and see sopping wet construction paper on the wood floor. We life it and see...

Now this would be bad in any instance, but you may remember the saga over the floors in this room and how we fought hard to make it look perfect. And in an instant, two small children had ruined our efforts. OK, I'm being a bit melodramatic - I know it will sand out if we ever were to refinish the floors, but that is most definitely not on the horizon.

Various websites provide options of varying degrees of confidence. Both of us agree that Magic Eraser seems like a bad idea, since it actually sands away some of the finish. So we opt first for a vinegar solution and a cloth. That removes a lot of the blue and a small amount of the yellow. Next, it's on to a baking soda solution. I have to warn you, keeping a consistent white balance with these pictures was pretty much impossible, so you'll have to use your imagination a bit to compare between pictures.

Even with something as gentle as baking soda, instructions across several websites seem to suggest that gently rubbing it, rather than aggressively scrubbing it, was the way to go. Even baking soda could pull off some of the shine. So we put some elbow grease into it for a while.

 And in the end? Well, you tell me. What do you see? Here's the "finished" picture, from two angles (and evidently two very different light sources?).

Do you see it? We do. It's a lot better but the yellow is still there lurking. We're hoping that no one else will ever notice it and that, with time, neither will we. Our wood floors are generally a honey color, so maybe it will just look like variation in the wood. Or we might go back and take another stab at it with something more aggressive. Do you have any ideas? We've read so many things on the internet that we'd prefer to try something that one of you, dear reader(s) has actually successfully used in a similar situation.

We were surprised that a color as light as yellow lasted more than the blue, until D reminded me about the constant problems we're dealing with on our counter when I make my new favorite drink, a golden milk latte. Getting turmeric on the counters keeps requiring me to pull out the big guns of a countertop cleaner, rather than just our normal dish soap and water. I didn't take a picture because I didn't want to let the color sit for even a moment longer than I needed to, once I realized that I'd gotten some on the counter (I usually make my drink on the stove, AWAY from the new counter). Not that we think turmeric is the source for yellow in construction paper, but who knows...

Until then, well, we're feeling a little yellow.

Tick Tubes

In our constant quest to rid our yard of unpleasant biting things, we have used a service to spray our yard (despite my misgivings about it affecting other bugs we want to keep around, like bees and butterflies). For the last two summers, we also used two GAT devices, though we sometimes forget to maintain them throughout the season. This year, we added something else to our arsenal: tick tubes.

We opted to try homemade ones, though we failed to plan ahead and save the dozens of toilet paper/paper towel tubes that would have been necessary. We worked with what we had available within the span of a weekend and decided to give it a try. It seemed silly to spend $50 or more when we had all the ingredients so readily available. When we set out new ones later in the year, we will plan better.

Cardboard tubes, dryer lint (and some additional cotton balls, because - again - we didn't plan ahead very well) and permethrin and BAM, tick killers. There are lots of online instructions to find. The basic idea is to soak the lint in a permethrin solution of about 7-8% strength (so dilution depends on how strong the solution is that you have in the bottle already). Let them dry out and then stuff them in toilet paper tubes. In theory, mice will use the lint for building nests and the permethrin, which is harmless for mammals, will infect the ticks that also settle there.

Again, because we waited until it was "go time" to do this, we didn't realize that it required far more tubes than we expected (they're supposed to be every 10-15 ft, around the edge of the property). But we tried with what we could. Timing seemed more important here than getting it perfect, because th aim is to do it right around tick breeding season in late April. In fact, we may have been a week too late even then, because we found a tick a couple of weeks earlier. But again, it's our first time - we'll do better next round (which I guess is in July some time).

Our tick tubes are gently buried in the leaves, hopefully where the mice will find them. The one in this picture is practically invisible, and pretty near our GAT, in fact. This picture kills two biting insects with one shot...And that weak play on words probably makes you want to groan.

Fingers crossed that these efforts actually help. It would be so nice to go in the yard and not feel like I'm a feast to all sorts of disease-carrying critters.

More Outdoorsy Updates

Really, April and May posts should just be "here are lots of green things" because we end up spending so much time out making our yard pretty (or our attempt at pretty) that that's the extent of our home improvements for spring. It's even hard to find a common theme beyond that. And while we have other ongoing projects, they're on the back burner for the few months we can actually get outdoors in moderate weather and relatively bug free (though I did get my first bug bites this week, so I think the season is coming to an end).

One of the main things that we (ok, really just D) has done, was finish dismantling the brick oven in the back corner of the house, to make way for a potential shed. Then it was time to dispose of the junk, especially after our pest control company mentioned that the brick pile was a breeding ground for ticks. D experimented by putting a few of the smaller pieces out for trash pick up. No dice. Not that I blame our public works people - even these small pieces are heavy. Our town wouldn't even take them away with a "bulk pick-up" request. Construction material evidently wasn't acceptable.

 So how to get rid of this giant pile?

Fortunately, we found a local company that would come haul it all away. They didn't even charge much extra to take it directly from the back yard (we would have saved something like $40 if we brought it to the driveway, but our backs were very much in favor of paying the money and saving us from aches and pains). And so this:

 turned into this:

D specifically wanted to keep those extra wood rails and individual bricks. In one afternoon, he used the extra bricks to make this border and weed and mulch it. Isn't it pretty? He's hoping it will help prevent some soil erosion we've been experiencing in that area.

He's been using a lot of the soil we had delivered in April to fill in low spots in our yard and plant with grass seed, something the kids have enjoyed helping with.

A few unrelated observations and questions (unrelated except for the fact that they are yard-focused).

First, our Japanese Snowbell bloomed! We planted it in fall 2017 and don't recall that it flowered last summer (probably was acclimating and sending out roots). It's beautiful and fragrant and we're thrilled we haven't killed it (yet). This picture is a week past the peak but still shows the blossoms, I hope.

Second, our hammock is dingy, which we know is what we deserve for leaving it outside spring through fall. Anyone have an idea of how to clean it (the wood boards at both ends are permanently knotted in)? Maybe I have to try to give it a swirl in the bathtub?

And finally, our new maple tree in the backyard (also planted in fall 2017) has spots on the leaves. That can't be good. A quick google suggests this is "tar spot" and a type of fungus and that we have to wait until fall to treat (by raking away the infected leaves). But if you have any other suggestions or diagnoses, please share.

'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.