The Underground

Today's post will combine a few landscaping adventures from last year with our latest bizarre discovery. Though we never fail to call Miss Utility before any kind of digging, we continue to find a lot of things under our lawn that are definitely beyond the scope of a check. It always leaves me wondering what our yard used to look like before we moved in (going on 12 years now).

I don't even remember how we started finding these problem areas--I think it. was simply because the grass (or even the weeds that we call grass) was not thriving. We started adding compost and churning up the soil, trying to loosen it up to plant new grass, when we realized there was landscaping cloth EVERYWHERE. This wasn't at the edge of our property, where there had perhaps been gardens. This was under so much of our yard. Of course our lawn wasn't growing happily--there was nowhere for the roots to spread out. D spent multiple weekends slowly pulling it out and replacing it with dirt. 

There was no trick that we could figure out for removing it. Just a shovel and a pick and manually trying to pull it up. It came up in giant sheets in some places. We really do think that this entire quarter or so of our back yard, the part that we cleared out seven years ago. I guess it really was a garden at some point, though it was just an overgrown mess by the time we moved in.

By the end, we had quite a lot of landscaping cloth piled up and ready to be trashed. The grass seems happier already (or it would if we hadn't destroyed it while building the patio).

Part two of "what is under the ground" is this giant hole that emerged this past fall. Not a groundhog this time, we think. More likely the finally decaying tree roots leftover from the big tree that fell down a few years ago. It took a lot of dirt and stomping on it to cover it up but it hasn't come back since we took care of it in October. At least this one was easy to deal with.

  

And finally, our latest underground discovery--corrugated pipe that used to be connected to the downspouts. We did a little bit of pipe repair under our patio when it was rebuilt and it was pretty clear that whatever system had been in place previously was clogged/collapsed/non-functional. And lo and behold, as we were gardening, D noticed a sad patch of grass, dug in his shovel and SURPRISE - cheap corrugated pipe! It had utterly collapsed and wasn't connected to anything and was blocking the roots of our grass, so it had to come out. No easy feat, of course. Because we uncovered just about a foot of it at first, but we knew that there was much more.

Much, much, much more.

And then we found even more, elsewhere in the yard. Seriously what is going on under our yard?!

We couldn't get it all out because, in some spots, it went deep enough that we couldn't easily dig it up. But we pulled out easily 30 feet, probably more.

There was another interesting thing that we managed to pull from the ground while doing yard work, but if I say too much, I'll be getting ahead of myself, since I haven't told you about this project yet. So here's a bit of a spoiler for our river rock garden--with the giant steel beam under it. (What the heck was going on in this yard before we moved in? Seriously!)

The Magic Phrase is "Flickering Lights"

Well who knew we'd luck out and solve this problem so quickly (I mean, it has been going on for weeks but within about 12 hours of last night's blog post, we had an answer). So first, I have to fill in one detail that I left out last night because I didn't think it was relevant: a couple days into the patio build, we noticed some wires had been cut outside our house, probably by the big truck driving gravel to the back yard. A local electrician came by to make sure it wasn't live and said it was only an old phone line (given what minimal information I know about copper phone lines, this seemed logical).

Still, we had our utility service come out and check the pole as well. We were cleared and good to go--not an electrical issue. This seemed to support the fact that we weren't experiencing any outages (because if an electrical line to your house gets cut, you'd expect to lose power, right?). So we did all our due diligence and it seemed like a non-issue. When our power started acting just a tiny bit weird a couple days later, we honestly figured it couldn't be related, given all the professional opinions. Anyway, thanks to the magic of 20/20 hindsight, it turns out this fact is pretty important. 

After an email to the electrician last night to mention that the situation seemed to have worsened and that now our lights were flickering pretty badly, he agreed to come take another look since it sounded bad. After less than 5 minutes and without him even coming into the house, we had a new diagnosis. He pointed to the pole outside our house. A silver wire was hanging free, right next to the pole (we thought that was just a "support wire" for the power). He said that it was the neutral and it was broken. 

It turns out, if you lose the neutral, the circuit will complete by running through the ground, attached to a water pipe, to a neighbor's house and use THEIR neutral. So that's a LOT more resistance, which means high power appliances like microwaves and dryers will struggle to get enough electricity. He said to call the power company and say we were experiencing flickering lights at the triplex.

When we called to report the problem this time,  we realized that the utility even had a voice prompt for "flickering lights." Apparently that was the word to use--and the word we didn't use three weeks ago when we called them to check on the broken line (because, at the time we weren't experiencing any problems). Needless to say, they were outside our house within a couple of hours.

And lo and behold, full power! Dryer, garbage disposal, microwave, all running at the same time and the office power stayed on! Not to mention the dryer and the microwave sound a lot happier and higher powered.

So we have an unnecessary microwave now, but I guess seven years isn't that crazy for a replacement. Given that the electrician didn't charge us for any of his two house calls, I'd say we came out ahead on this one.

It's Getting Worse

So this electricity thing. Of course the house would start falling apart right after a big, elective upgrade. Here's what's happened so far--

• A day or two into the new patio build, the landscaping company accidentally cut a wire to our house. We had it checked out and were told it was just an old copper phone line, so we dismissed everything that followed as unrelated.
• About three weeks ago, a couple days after the phone line was cut, we started noticing that the lights beginning to flicker pretty dramatically.
• After about a week of making sure we weren't crazy or needed our eyes checked, we tentatively linked the flickering to using the microwave, but we still weren't certain. The office was affected, with the computer plugged into a powerstrip attached to one of the sockets being forcibly shut down. No circuits in the basement were tripping but a GFCI was. 
• Then the same thing happened, but the light didn't start working again when we reset the GFCI. That brings us to where we were during my last post about the issue.
• D did some reading and consulting and decided that the microwave was the likely (and also cheapest, though microwaves aren't exactly "cheap" culprit). So we ordered one.
• He also solved the problem with the light in the office with some tinkering that required only minor electrical work and therefore was permissible according to my general sense of things you should and should not attempt with no professional training:
• Apparently, you can test the switch when the electricity is off, to see if it still can conduct power. This switch, apparently, failed the continuity test (see the 1? that means no continuity, even though it was switched on):

• A new switch that we just happened to have in the garage passed the continuity test with those 000s when the switch is in the "on" position.
  

• So D swapped out the switches and suddenly the light worked. Go us! And with a new microwave on the way, we figured we were on our way to solving this.
• Then the microwave arrived. We took a quick peek behind the wall before they put the new one in, just to make sure there wasn't any kind of visible issue there that could have caused the microwave to break. Nope, all good:

• So we have this new microwave (we selected that microwave like we select pretty much everything these days, by seeing what the Wirecutter recommends and buying it, because we're lazy. We decided to final switch from black (to match our oven and dishwasher) to stainless steel (to match our fridge) in the hopes that eventually we will end up with everything being stainless.

• And guess what. The new microwave solved literally nothing. Not only didn't it fix the existing flickers, but they seem like they are getting worse. Now we can consistently predict that the office will short whenever we start the dryer and even sometimes when the heat clicks on.The garbage disposal even significantly dims the lights.

An electrician came out to take a look and he checked the circuit box, tightened some things, and confirmed that all of these things are on separate circuits. Other than that, he had truly no idea what to do. He didn't charge for the visit, at least.

Then today, turning on the dryer even made the living room lights turn off, then on, then off, then on again. This problem seems to be spreading and we have no more leads and an unnecessary microwave (we actually miss our old one, but oh well).

Any ideas? Besides trying a new electrician.

New beginnings

I'm going to step back from the big patio plans and the electricity drama for a post that spans last year and this year--with lots of pictures--to talk about our garden and some baby trees. Last year, we really delved into gardening (probably because our spring...summer...fall...etc. suddenly opened up when all our plans got canceled). I'd already paid a small donation to the Arbor Day Foundation for something like 12 baby trees and we'd already ordered some vegetable seeds and started them in the house. So we were already set for something sort of resembling success.

We planned what would go where. We learned pretty quickly that squash gets way to big to put in the middle and that "container" tomato plants are too tiny and did not make sense for our big garden, We had great luck with snap peas, cherry tomatoes (a red variety--I forget which one specifically), and (diva) cucumbers. The squash was a mixed bag (they seemed to stay small, likely because they got so cramped, but they were still tasty and quite easy to sneak into a few smoothies), as were the radishes (we must have planted them too close because most never got very big). The  "midnight snack" cherry tomatoes were fine but no one really liked the taste. The eggplants, peppers, container variety of tomatoes, and carrots failed. Not sure why, but none of those were anything we really cared about enough to try again.

Now as to the trees--they arrived about a month later than they were supposed to thanks to COVID. When they finally arrived, 12 bare-root sticks that had a paint dot on them to identify what was what, we honestly had no idea where to put them. But they had to go in the ground. 

So we put some around the lawn after clearing a little space in the grass and we put a few in the garden. And I knew, just KNEW, I'd have no idea what was what or where. And thus: a map. Each kind of tree got a code and the new ones were outlined in pink.

Within even a few weeks, thanks to nibbling birds or squirrels and other misfortunes, most were broken in two. We even found one in the garden completely dug up (thanks a lot, fence). It didn't look great. And now, fast forward a year and we have two hawthorns left. But we'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, back to the garden. This year, we tried something new, after we realized how much we did NOT like to go outside to water in July and August while the mosquitoes feasted on us. Irrigation!

Armed with some hoses and spikes, as well as a fancy timer (see: not wanting to go outside to water), we installed a system through the yard and into the garden to keep the veggies happy.

It obviously worked. Our garden went from this:

To this:

Of course I have to show you some of the results, too:

See the one purple bean. Yeah that was the only one...

When the season was ending, we even attempted to grow a late fall garden, mapped out here (we like maps, apparently). We hauled in the irrigation system though, figuring it would get a lot less brittle if we kept it in the shed all winter.

                        

How did it go? Well here's the funny thing. Nothing really seemed to happen--maybe we planted it too late and there wasn't enough sun. One of the broccolis, which we started from tiny plants and not seeds, did eventually develop a head, but it was so tiny it was literally a single piece I would normally cut my broccoli head into. So we ignored it. Until today.

Yesterday, I headed into the garden to start clearing it out for this year. And to my surprise, there was enough broccoli and kale to harvest. The broccoli was just starting to bolt but we decided to give both a try. And sautéd with some olive oil and garlic, this was our delicious side dish tonight at dinner:

Having cleared out the last of the fall harvest as well as all the weeds and what roots I could find, I roto-tilled the soil and added two wheelbarrow's full of compost. So here we are, ready to go for another year.

                                                    

I decided to create a better plan for our growing zone than just "put them in the ground" or "start them in the house, then plant them in the ground." The seed company (Burpee this year--last year it was a brand I can't remember) says what time to plant for which zone, so I might as well use that information. I labeled each packet and put them back in order, so I could remember what happens when. It looked like we'll plant a few early birds in about a week, do another batch in mid-April, and then another batch in early-to-mid-May.

                                           

Here's a close-up of what I jotted down:  

I started the tomatoes earlier this month in pots on the window sill and added a bit more light in the blue/purple spectrum to help them stop leaning toward the window. I started some snap peas as well, more as an experiment to see which do better when we put them outside next week--the seeds or the plants. And upon finally mapping out this plan, I'm realizing I need to start the herbs indoors ASAP and just need to dye some Easter eggs to get some empty cartons for start pots.

Back to those trees, from earlier in the post. I planted 12 last May and a mere 2 remain. This Hawthorn, smack in the middle of the lawn and another in the garden.

Though the stick was about 18'' high, the leaves were all only at the bottom. It turned out that the rest of the stick was so brittle and dead that it snapped just above the leaves while I was working in the garden.

So there's a 5'' Hawthorn in there now that I managed to not rototill. Though it obviously isn't going to live in the garden forever, it's so tiny that we'll leave it there at least another year to see if it can get bigger and stronger before we put it anywhere else.

7-day patio

One week of work and we arrived at our final result! The crew wrapped up and we couldn't be happier. The flagstone patio is beautiful! We already enjoyed a fire pit and dinner outside (and the kids happily chalked over the whole thing). The river rock on both sides of the stairs really cleaned up that area (there was already rock near the hose but the other side was a flower bed full of ivy and a sad azalea). They took out the river rock already there and laid down landscaping cloth first to freshen the whole thing up. Turns out, having rocks hauled in can be unexpectedly expensive, but we're glad that we did it. Now both sides are symmetric, the ivy that we had to keep from creeping up the brick wall of the garage is gone, and there's much less dirt (and, therefore mud) so close to the house).

You can see, due to the glaring white, that the team also replaced our downspouts, swapping cheap corrugated black piping that was collapsing with sturdy PVC. The sharp bend on the left one is because the downspout leads right to a concrete platform under the stairs, so the pipe has to curve around that before heading underground. We are wondering if there's something we can do to make it less noticeable but I imagine a few months of rain and dirt might do the job for us.

Here's another view of the s-bend downspout attachment and also all this space under our stairs that was totally blocked by a mostly dead, leggy azalea. We don't know what we'll store under there, but it is definitely usable space, especially after we pressure wash it well.

As a reminder, here's what it all looked like before we began, with the azalea circled in yellow:

I couldn't resist cutting to the end to show off the final product, but here are some "process" photos. The landscaping cloth under the river rocks are visible, as is the smoke coming off the blade used to cut the flagstones into this beautiful pattern. The team was really careful, going back over the stones to make sure they were firm before applying polymeric sand and finishing the whole thing off:

Stay tuned--we have more plans for the patio and also a second project to show off next time.

Of course something would break

Of course we'd have a sudden house issue exactly when we're in the midst of an expensive elective upgrade. On Friday, we noticed the under-cabinet lights flickering in the kitchen while we were preparing lunch. Then this week, we started to notice that the flickering seemed to sync up to when we were running the microwave. And the microwave was sounding a little loud.

It seemed pretty ignorable though. Maybe a weird power draw, yes, but ignorable.

Tonight though, the office power went out when we reheated dinner. Uh...ok this has officially escalated to no-longer-ignorable. The microwave seems to be the culprit:

But, I said, our microwave is pretty new! It can't be the microwave! How long is a microwave supposed to last? Well thanks to this blog, I was able to tell pretty quickly how old the microwave was. Seven years old. To the month. To which I thought, "See? That's too new to need replacing."

Google, however, has other ideas:

Touché, Google. 

And given this last year, let's just say that we're using it a whole lot more than we used to, since we're home and preparing food ALL.THE.TIME.

The problem now appears that the light in the office will no longer turn on, even after we reset all the GFCIs that were tripped. We tried replacing the bulbs just in case those were at fault. But no.

So we're left with a conundrum of whether to buy a microwave or hire an electrician. It seems like the internet agrees that our microwave should not be on the same circuit as other normal things like lamps and outlets, so that might require some electrical work. And this light might be completely busted. D suggested taking the fixture off to test if the wires were still working, but that feels like a step too far in the "leave for a professional" direction. We change fixtures, but only when the circuits are off. Deliberately turning them on to test whether the electricity is flowing is where I draw the line. And so it's a chicken and egg problem: do we call the electrician or replace the microwave?

(For better or worse, we made a decision: new microwave arriving on Monday.)
 

A 3-Day Patio

Work began mid-week for the new patio--a 6-person crew worked all day on day to prep the site. First step of course was to demo the rest of the bricks, the framing, etc. The crew quickly realized that they would have to remove all the flagstone along our walkway beside the house, since they had to be able to bring heavy machinery in. That was a surprise to all of us, and we now have our trashcans and yard waste bins smooshed under some greenery in our back yard, making trash and recycling das a bit of a challenge.

More demo, including the flagstones right at the base of the stairs (we're keeping them, but they've been stacked in a corner for now):

The flagstones have arrived! They're so pretty--much more natural than the Belgard, because, well, they are! All stone instead of a composite that looked much more like concrete than rock.

A truck bed full of gravel seemed like way too much gravel--until they used it all up by Friday and still hadn't finished filling the patio.

Because no job is without a few surprises and disappointments, here were some we uncovered--literally-- during our first week. First, a pipe with a hole in it! We knew the drainage pipes from our back gutters had to be buried under the patio, and one of our goals during this project was to find them and make sure they were in tact and unclogged. Well, we found them. This large diameter clay pipe had a pretty large chunk missing. Which also happened to be, as we recalled, where a low, often damp, spot was in our brick patio. Not a coincidence, obviously.

Here it is from a different angle--you can see the ceramic drainage pipe uncovered, and where the hole is. That hole was the most dramatic problem, requiring a a PVC pipe be coupled up to that area for about a foot, but the team uncovered a few more spots that needed amending too--most were able to be fixed with mortar. And of course this was our chance to do these repairs, while the pipes were more easily accessed. They also replaced some of our cheap corrugated black plastic drain pipes right where they joined with the metal gutter downspouts with more sturdy PVC as well.

A second problem was coming outside to see our poor magnolia, looking a bit exposed. When we plotted out the footprint of our patio, we did our best to guess where the roots would be and steered clear of them. So imagine our surprise to see the tree uncovered like this. We spoke to the design lead, who promised to tell the crew to rebury them and treat them gently after that, but hopefully no permanent damage was done.

And so work continued--the crew built a giant trench along the edge of the new patio and filled it with gravel and fat rocks, three deep, to build up the wall.

They started dumping in the gravel that seemed so copious at the beginning of the project. They packed it down. Friday was noisy.

And then that was it, for now. The gravel didn't quite fill as much as it needed to, but it was solid enough for us to walk on this weekend, and at least the piles of gravel were out of the road and driveway where they'd been for a few days. And so, three days in, here we are, ready for another week of work.