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.

 

Brickfest

We've been spending a lot of time at home. No surprise there, for those lucky enough to have a place they can hunker down through this crazy year. And with small energetic kids, a lot of that time has been spent outside. So it was also no surprise, I suppose, that the first major project we're taking on since our kitchen remodel would be something to make our outdoor space more enjoyable.

D has wanted a deck for a while, but I was not sold, enjoying the existing brick patio (at least for those parts of the year when bugs don't attack me). Rumors that mosquitos did not tend to attack on a deck did not seem to hold up after visits to friends' patios in the neighborhood. D came around on the 'no deck' idea when he realized how much he liked being to walk into the yard from every edge of the patio. But both D and I knew that we needed more space, and space that did not constantly have weeds growing up all over the place.

And so after a few estimates, we're converting this space, as seen in the two pictures below (just ignore the giant slackline--it's been a long year...)

To this:

In the pictures we submitted for permitting, you can see that the patio will expand out behind the back of the garage (hopefully ending just before it starts to become a problem for the roots of the nearby magnolia tree) and another foot deeper. Some of the greenery immediately behind the garage (where we constantly battle ivy crawling up the house) will be filled with river rock to mirror the existing river rock not he other side of the steps). Instead of the individual bricks currently making up the patio space, we opted for giant flagstones. Fewer spaces for weeds to grow. We briefly considered Belgard pavers but were surprised how much they just looked like concrete when we saw them in person.

We have other plans for what we're going to do with this space after the initial install, but I'll keep that a secret for now. But one of those plans involves using the bricks that used to be part of the patio. So in the run up to next week's professional crew, D and the kids spent the week digging up bricks. Some were worn out, cracked, or edged with mortar. But most of the patio was held together simply by pressure, so plenty of the bricks are clean and in very good condition.

We were surprised to find a tiny little water way under the bricks. It led down to a pretty deep hole before we gave up trying to follow it. It was fun pouring water into it and watching it flow.

In the end, we have over 500 bricks piled up for future use. Now we're ready for the professionals!

Back, Sort of

Hi there, blog world. I'm not really sure why there's been a one year gap here. It's not like I wasn't at home (I was at home sooooo much) and it's not like we weren't doing stuff around the house. But I just could not, for the life of me, find the energy to write anything. And then I read a good post recently that so succinctly summed up why I couldn't seem to write a single update: "given that the world is on fire, it will seem callous or insensitive in the face of it all..." And I think that's it exactly. How can I even begin to write about silly things like power washing and grout when...everything.

Well it's not like that has changed, though perhaps it finally feels like the firefighters are on their way to this metaphorical fire and maybe writing about silly, unimportant things like home improvements will start to be a little easier. But really, what changed is that first, we're about to embark on a relatively large project, and I really do enjoy getting to see the before and after pictures and the progress along the way in narrative form. And, second, even when I wasn't updating the blog, I was regularly consulting it to find out things like "when was the last time I did..." and "what color did we use to paint the..." and that won't keep being useful if I don't continue to update. 

So that's all just a big introduction to say that I'm back, sort of kind of mostly.

But how to catch up on a year of stuff while also telling you (and myself, because let's face it--this is really for me) about our upcoming project? I'm going to list some of the things here that we've done this year and go back and create a full post for it later. When I do that, I'll update the link below. I'll also try to start on some of the new stuff. Two parallel threads, running along different timelines. 

Without further ado, here is a list of what we did during the suspended animation of 2020 (and a little into 2021):

• re-grouted the kitchen sink and bathroom tub, which now took place so long ago that we already have to do it again...
• planted a mostly successful garden from seeds
• planted tiny trees from the Arbor Foundation, most of which have died or been eaten
• removed wisteria and some invasive bushes from the back edge of the backyard fence
• cut into that back edge to add more grass/usable yard behind the swing sets
• bought a cheap bidet attachment to the upstairs toilet (trying to cut down on toilet paper and all that)
• power washed the house, which is already slimy looking and ready for another round
• pulled up crazy amounts of landscaping cloth from under our back yards (whyyyyy???)
• filled in a giant hole from what we're hoping was a root from a decaying tree
• had a tree cut down
• emptied out an entire cabinet full of cloth diapers to make space for games and puzzles
• unclogged some gutters
• dealt with (ok mostly just watched) a really massive flood in our backyard 
• added some more edging pavers to the side of the shed
• changed the bed arrangement in the kids' room
• cleaned out the dryer vents
• had the chimney swept
• replaced parts in our upstairs bathroom to stop the shower faucet from leaking

Stay tuned as I eventually create posts for many of these, with pictures. I'll save the big reveal on what our new major project will be for next time.