So we gave in.....

After three years of home and land ownership we gave in. We paid someone to do our yard work.

In the end, it was an easy decision. Weeds and bushes, interspersed with poison ivy, had overwhelmed swaths of our backyard. For a not-insane amount of money we could pay a crew to clean our entire yard in a couple of days. They divided the work estimate by sections of our yard. Front center. Front right. Back right. Back center, fence line. Back of the house. Left side, from front to back. We agreed to have everything cleared except the left side, since we aren't sure where our property line is and are too lazy to check it with the county.

They mostly worked during the day when we were out of the house - which is just as well so that we didn't have to endure the noise, or feel guilty that we had finally given in and were not out there doing the work ourselves. We did catch them in action once or twice:

It's hard to capture the difference in before/after shots because we deliberately had them leave each area a little wild. Dealing with some ivy (English, not poison) and Japanese spurge (which I learned from our landscapers is more commonly known as pachysandra) is better than dealing with bare dirt and mud. And we already know our track record for getting grass to grow, so we though it was better not to tempt fate and clear out the entire area in the hopes of expanding the grass part of our lawn  - especially into a shady, low-lying section prone to accumulating standing water.

So without further ado - here's the bag corner of our yard, the messiest part, before:

(Note that we still never got around to chopping up the last of the little tree we took down last spring.)

 And after

Besides chopping up the rest of the trunk, they seriously cleaned out all the undergrowth, trimmed back the out-of-control azalea bushes, and removed poison ivy and tiny saplings. Now we can actually see the little brick oven from the house.

The back fence line, before:

And after:

Huge improvement - not just from trimming back the low branches on the tree but clearing out all the junk (while keeping some healthy looking plants like hostas). Again, we asked them to keep it a little wild - and keep the ivy on the chain-link fence - for some privacy from our neighbors.

Here's the back of the house, before:

Even though we cleared around the air conditioner every spring, the wild ivy and plants grew back by mid-summer.

But now they won't, since the landscapers pulled all that junk away:

(The hosta always looks a little unwell by fall - it will perk up next spring and do a marvelous job of hiding the AC unit.)

Before

Our yard certainly isn't a manicured beauty, but it'll be easier to spruce up this spring. Especially since now we can actually walk into the more "wild" portions of our yard and do some additional clean-up ourselves. It had gotten so overgrown (and filled with poison ivy) that we didn't even know where to begin before.

Giving Thanks

I'm a few days late but I didn't want to miss the chance to give thanks this year. We have so many things to be thankful for - amazing family and friends who never fail to help us with so much around the house, the fact that we are fortunate enough to be able to call in the professionals when needed, our health, and the simple fact that we have a roof over our head and food in our pantry.

This year though, I have one thing I am especially thankful for. Readers of this blog will appreciate our hard fought victory on this one: WE HAVE HEAT! Not just in some places and not just a little. For the first time since we moved in, each and every baseboard gets evenly, toasty warm. It is so nice not to struggle to keep the house at a comfortable temperature (admittedly, our "comfortable" temperature is a little colder than most people's). We no longer feel a weird current of air between our living room and our hallway, as the rooms that didn't heat stole all the warm air from the rooms that did. I am so grateful that this winter, we won't be forced to wrap ourselves in blankets and sweaters. Though we can if we want to, of course. It will be so nice to choose whether we want to huddle under blankets or not - and actually have the temperature respond accordingly.

Ikea visit treasures

A month or two ago, we wandered around our newly remodeled Ikea to see what nifty new things we could find. I thought I'd share with you what came home with us.

The first thing we saw were these cute little Norrora egg bowls in the bathroom section. We still hadn't figured out where to put cotton balls and q-tips in our new bathroom. We had pretty white crates hanging on the wall for shelves and I was afraid that using glass jars open on top would result in something crashing to the floor whenever I tried to take something out. These were the perfect solution.

Don't they look cute - and the soft white ceramic goes great with the rest of the decor.

Second, you may remember this pretty sewing table that I refinished this summer was missing a knob. I knew I wanted something glassy and transparent and preferably blue. Everything I found cost more than $5/knob. At six knobs, that's more than I payed for the table. So imagine my joy when I came across these cheap plastic drawer knobs called Satta.  They are available in a bunch of cute colors, including the perfect teal for me.

Here's the table with the old wood knobs. Nice but boring. Also missing one on the bottom drawer.

Here it is with some punchy blue accents. So much better!

The quality of the knobs are pretty appalling, but this piece won't be getting much wear and tear, so they should hold up just fine. At any rate, since they are just $2 for all six, they'll be fine until I feel like splurging or can find something more durable on sale.

Last but not least, the most expensive, and heaviest, purchase of the day. Here it is - the mystery box.

 It's Norden!

I was so excited about this table! We had gotten rid of the table that had migrated up from the basement, much damaged after this little incident chiseling glass out of a window frame. I don't think I ever took a picture of this room when the table was in it - but trust me when I say it took up way too much room and was ugly and broken. I was so excited when D allowed me to get rid of it - we put it on the curb and someone took it within a half hour.

Norden is the perfect replacement - it doesn't take up much space but expands to fit a lot of people, with two swing-out leaves. It has plenty of storage (3 drawers on each side) and, the icing on the cake, it was a surprisingly fast assembly.

So we didn't get out of Ikea without spending some mulah, but at least we came away with some nifty treasures.

Sandy Fever

A couple of weeks ago Sandy moseyed on by the house. She left us copious amounts of rain, oodles of downed twigs, and one large branch which decided to visit our roof and gutter on the way down. Fortunately we kept power during the whole event - which made me happy since I didn't have to manually empty the sump.

Here's the temporary swamp. This area always goes mushy when it rains a lot. At some point we should figure out whether we can direct the water any better. At least it's in the very back corner of the yard.

The branch. I had to put the blue bucket underneath the gutter so too much dirt wouldn't wash away. 

Branch + house = broken stuff. The gutter seems happier now, with it's silly grin. Just a little drooly.

$125 later, our roof guy replaced a few tiles and bent the gutter back. Our other options were: whole new copper gutter or just a few new feet of copper gutter. At $25/foot we weren't too interested in getting any new gutter installed. Also, new copper is very shiny, so the house would look very odd for at least a couple of years if we only got a few feet installed. So here's the original gutter, just hammered back in shape.

Not too bad. We've been living here for over three years now and have had blizzards, wind storms, tropical storms, and numerous power outages and have filed zero claims for the insurance company. They really should be dropping our rate!

(Here's hoping this post doesn't jinx us!)

Lawn Labors

Anyone who's been following this blog for a few years know that each fall and spring, we slave over trying to make the lawn look healthy and green. I mentally divide the work into two major parts. The first is reclaiming the lawn from overgrown weeds, bushes, ivy, border plants gone wrong, etc. The second is making the areas that are already lawn grow green, healthy, weed-free grass. (yes, all of these categories lead to a different post, which should give you some idea of how much effort we've put in over time).

This year, as I mentioned last time, we decided we needed professional help. We did some work on our own in the spring, before the bugs came out. We cleared out some more liriope from the side section next to our driveway, both giving the bushes more room and carving out some more "lawn" area from the overgrown border edge:

But then this started happening every time we went outside (if you can't tell from my ugly feet, I have about 10 mosquito bites from working in the yard for about 10 minutes). So we largely ignored the outside all summer, whenever possible, doing only minimal yard work and weeding.

So this fall when we realized we needed to hire some people to take down our tree, we also got a quote on the grass and decided that the monetary cost was far better than the blood, sweat, and tears we were devoting to making it look nice. Because the grass seed we were laying never grew healthy and because we have moss, the landscaper declared that our soil was too acidic (apparently this is good for gardens, but not for lawns). So he advised the lawn of debris, advised aerating the soil to break it up a little, laying down lime to turn the soil more alkaline, and then over-seeding with hearty sun/shade combo grass seed. For under $500, they would fix our front, back, and side yards.

They spend a couple of days doing everything they said they would, laying down some straw to protect the seed and even come back twice to re-clear debris - the acorns this year were particularly voluminous and hard to clean up (they cleaned up once again for free and then we agreed to pay them to come back once more).

We're not really seeing any improvement, but hopefully all the conditions are right and in the spring we'll get some new healthy grass. In the meantime, we're doing our part. Already last year, we were trying to get in the habit of keeping the lawn free of leaves with a combination of raking, blowing, and mowing (none of which are very good at clearing the acorns, which is why we paid to let them handle those). We learned that leaves are acidic, and so in addition to killing grass by covering it up, it also ruins the soil by releasing acids while decomposing (remember - alkaline is good for grass).

Late this week, the trees finally decided it was fall and dropped a bunch of leaves (with many more still on the trees waiting to fall). So today D cut the lawn, picking up the leaves as he went. It's really quite amazing that a lawn mower can be such an effective leaf clearer.

And now we wait until spring and see if we got our money's worth!

Tree take-down

I have to confess something. The whole time I've been blogging about our heating system, we've actually been shelling out some serious moolah for another big project. This year we decided to call in some professional help with our yard. We've spent 4 autumns in this house trying to get the yard and garden into shape with minor results. And we really haven't enjoyed it. We were on the fence about whether to hire someone when we noticed that we had one tall dead tree and one half split dead tree. This wasn't a job for a friend - we needed real arborists.

We figured if we were going to hire people anyway, we might as well go for the whole deal. Today I'll show you the tree work, but I have a few more stories saved up on the other projects we had done. Unfortunately for this blog (but fortunately for our sanity), the landscapers did all their work during the day while we were at work. So the pictures aren't particularly dramatic - I would have loved to have gotten some while they were taking off the branches.

Instead, after one day of work, they had this waiting for us in the evening:

After the second day of work, those giant logs were gone and only this remained - a neatly stacked pile of tiny logs for our fireplace.

Oh, and the two large stumps, since stump removal would have cost a lot. Since the trees were in the back corner of the yard in our rather unmaintained area, we decided leaving the stumps in place was preferable to paying over $1000 to remove them.

Heating Conundrums (the end?)

The heating saga is now resolved. Not 100% to our satisfaction, but pretty close. 86%?

To quickly recap, the pipe loops that lead into and out of our bedroom were re-routed to run directly into (and out of) the boiler. The logic for the move was that since the pump on this loop appeared to be pulling so much water through the loop, the loop was to be moved to largely separate it from the rest of the system.

The problem was that after many hours of work, the bedroom still wasn't heating up. Even with its pump running. Also, the pump on this moved loop was very loud - it sounded like air was constantly flowing through. More on that later.

After the plumber left I spent about an hour bleeding all of the accessible bleeder valves. After pulling out a lot of air, the house was getting plenty warm, except for the bedroom.

What was strange was that the return pipe on the moved loop was getting warm while the feed was still ice cold. Which has two possible explanations: either this really isn't a loop or that the water is flowing the opposite direction we are expecting. I still don't know the answer.

What I did do was take advantage of a new lever.

This lever allows me to control whether the hot water flows vertically into the main loop (which feeds the entire house excluding the basement and master bedroom) or flows to the left, eventually into our bedroom. I ran the system for over an hour, the entire home was warm except the master bedroom. I left open the bedroom bleeder valves for several minutes to try and encourage the hot water, but was rewarded only with cold water.

I then went back to the basement boiler, turned the new lever, forcing water into the bedroom. I immediately heard water rushing into the feed, turning the feed pipes from cold to scalding hot. I turned the lever back to the original position. I went upstairs and our bedroom now had scalding hot water.

Thinking that this was just a temporary pulse I left the heat to run for another hour and periodically bled from the master bedroom valves. An hour later, still hot! So, I guess I fixed it?

I was hoping that the pump would stop being so loud after I got the water flowing into the feed. But it was still loud. I spoke with our plumber, who thought that the pump may be bad. He came over and replaced it with a new one - which made just as much noise. I tried disconnecting the pump to see whether it needed to be running to get hot water in the bedroom - it does.

So we are claiming victory now. It's a bit annoying to hear the raspy pump running, but it's only audible from the dining room/kitchen. It's worth the noise pollution to get heat EVERYWHERE. Winter, we are ready.

Old Bleeder Valves

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Let's take a break from our depressing heating problems to describe another quick fix we did the day that our family and friends came down to help us with our honey-do list. We bought some fiberglass insulation for our hot water heater over a year ago and had yet to install it. We missed putting it on before last winter, but I wasn't going to let another cold season go by without wrapping it up to keep it running more efficiently.

The process was pretty straightforward: wrap and tape (while leaving the front parts exposed). Here it all is, step-by-step in pictures.

Now if only everything were that easy!

Heating Conundrums (part the third)

This is becoming quite the serialized mystery tale. Today we had a team of two repairmen out here for 6 hours (they estimated the job would take 4 hours) and we still have not solved the problem.

To recap, our heating system is not heating all the rooms of our house evenly. Some get no heat at all, others are just fine. We've tried bleeding the system completely, bleeding a little out of each baseboard, fixing the piping, turning on/off the pump to different loops--and nothing seems to help. After coming out twice for no charge just to take a look and make some suggestions, this plumber/heating guy proposed a solution that would involve moving the master bedroom loop so that it wasn't fed from a pipe that led to the whole house (thus taking water away from the rest of the system). He would connect that loop directly to the boiler. So that would result in two circuits both coming directly out of the boiler - both with pumps to keep the water moving. While he was at it, he also would install auto-bleeders on both, to reduce the number of air bubbles in the system.

You can see the difference between the left and right pictures how much pipe-work he did. It's easy to recognize what's new, because it's done in shiny copper.

Here's a close-up of the two pumps. He connected them in a way that we could shut the valves above and below them if they should ever need to be replaced.

Each one has a little black box on it to control how much oomph goes into moving the water. Hypothetically, this means we can alter the percentage of hot water to each section, if one side gets warmer than the other.

Here are the fancy new bleeders (you can't quite see them in the first picture, but they're there, hiding behind our service form):

Creating the new loop meant a lot of restructuring down in the basement. They closed off two connections - one each to the main outgoing and incoming/return pipes (circled in red). The new copper pipes represent the new outgoing and return pipes for the new bedroom loop. They aren't attached to the thick, black steel pipes - they go all the way back to the boiler.

They also fixed the little section of pipe that got leaky from our last heating experiment.

This all sounds impressive, right? Well it seemed like it to us. And we were pretty sure this would fix the problem, based on which pipes were hot and which were cold when the system was running. The problem is that after 6 hours of work, our workmen ran the system and........no improvement. SERIOUSLY! We couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it. The master bedroom still gets no heat.

It was right about then that they realized they'd spent way longer at our house than they were expecting and one of the guy's brother-in-law called to ask for help because the water boiler in his restaurant stopped working. So they asked us to keep experimenting with bleeding the system, didn't charge us, and promised to be back in touch early next week to continue to figure out what to do.

We are starting to wonder if the loop they created never went to the bedroom at all. We all figured that it did, since it was the only cold pipe and the bedroom was the only cold room. The problem is that we are operating by process of elimination. We don't have a schematic for what pipes lead where behind the walls. It isn't really this company's fault, since we thought the same thing. Though we certainly won't be paying up until we get some resolution. I guess this problem remains "to be continued..."