More Work in the Garden

As I said in a previous post, I've been doing a lot of work in the garden. One of the first things I took care of was killing the ivy that was killing the tree by our back porch. I've killed the ivy (pictures of both the live and the dead ivy are below), but I'm not sure yet if I've saved the tree. The fact that fall has arrived doesn't make it any easier to tell. And I'm not sure how to get that ivy down. It is quite ugly now.

Tree smothered by ivy

Tree with Dead Ivy

I also have cleaned out several areas with overgrown planters. Most of them are just left as dirt right now, but I do have my little fall garden. I also cleaned out a couple of the planters in the back yard. 

Backyard planter before

Backyard planter now

Once again, that doesn't look like much of an improvement. I left the azaleas, but everything else was overgrown and ugly close up. I'll plant something new in it next spring, then it will hopefully look pretty both close up and from a distance. 

And I cleaned out the planter in front of our front patio. You can see the before in this shot of the house, the area to the right of the stairs. There wasn't much there to begin with, other than some weedy grass. I dug it up, along with some giant roots and pieces of cement that were hanging out there.

Front Planter now

It's all ready for the blueberry bushes I plan on planting there. I need a bit of a retaining wall to keep the dirt in as well. The sidewalk there has a slope, so the wall will be tall near the stairs and short over at the corner of the house.

My most recent task has been freeing the back fence from it's maze of ivy. I don't really have a great before picture. Here's my best one, but it had gotten much more overgrown. When I cleaned out the ivy, I found 3 overgrown rose bushes underneath. I'm going to try to bring them back to life by pruning them. I know very little about pruning, so we'll see if they are still alive next spring. I don't have a huge fondness for roses, but my grandfather loved them, so I hate to purposely kill them. I have two in the front yard too that I don't really want in the front yard. But if they can survive the transplantation to a different location, I welcome having them around as well. 

Back fence this spring

Back Fence now

Clearly one of my yard tasks will be repairing that fence. I'm hoping the fence posts are solid and I just have to replace the broken boards, but I haven't looked closely enough to know yet.

]All of this yardwork has resulted in a lot of yard waste. Too much for our weekly trash pick up. I had several piles going in the yard and it was starting to look messy, so I piled it up all in one place as if it is a compost pile. With pieces this large, it would probably take a decade for it actually to decompose, but at least it's all in one centralized location. Maybe I'll get a wood chipper some day and turn it into an actual compost pile.

The Joys of Homeownership: Appliances

We've lived in this house for 2 1/2 months and already had two broken appliances (plus the ice dispenser on the fridge, which was broken when we arrived, but since the fridge otherwise functioned, that hardly counted).

The disposal was a real bear. We were just finishing the bulk of our big home improvement projects and looking forward to an evening of relaxation when the darn thing just stopped working. It had gotten totally jammed up. My husband sat trying to unjam it for several hours the evening it jammed, but it just wouldn't turn freely. He ended up buying a new garbage disposal from Home Depot and installing the next day. I suspect that all the paint we washed down that sink wasn't good for the disposal. When we painted our bedroom, I wouldn't wash anything in the side of the sink with the disposal.

This weekend our washing machine stopped working. It wouldn't drain, it wouldn't spin. It just made a sad little humming sound then would trip the circuit breaker. I unloaded all of the clothes and wiggled thing to see if it would start working, but no luck. We pulled the box off so we could take a look at the inside. I successfully diagnosed the problem as something to do with the pump. We disconnected one side from the pump so we could try to turn it. Sure enough, it didn't turn. We were tired and still recovering from colds, so we decided to go to bed instead of dealing with it more. Water was still pouring out from it anyhow, so it was a bit hard to work with (my husband bailed the water out to the best of his ability, but there was still a lot left).

The next morning the water had completely drained and my husband took the pump off the rest of the way. He found one of my daughter's socks inside the pump, torn to shreds but still successfully jamming the wheel that is supposed to churn water through. Once reassembled, the machine works fine. Thank goodness for easy fixes. And for the internet with lots of how-to guides to help us discover the simple fixes ourselves instead of calling in the professionals.

Yardwork

While we did all the work inside the house, we were wanting to be outside, working in the yard. I'm a gardener and my husband has been dreaming of building an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven for months. So with the conclusion of the bedroom saga, we've been able to start focusing outside, where we have wanted to. I've done some more boring things (killing ivy, weeding, trimming roses), but also created a little garden bed for myself with some winter veggies growing, plus a large basil plant we bought a month or two ago from the farmer's market.

There are lettuce seedlings popping up here and there and the sugar peas are starting to climb the trellis I made for them from fallen tree limbs that I found around the yard.

My husband's project is much more impressive. Here's a picture of the current state of the pizza oven. 

That's just the stand. Firewood will be stored in that cubby-hole. A big igloo-like structure is planned for the top of that stand. He's keeping a record of his building progress here: http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f8/36-pompeii-dc-18213.html

Bedroom Finished!

We finally finished with our bedroom. (We actually finished the painting a couple weeks ago, but we couldn't get the crown molding up by ourselves, and it didn't look done without the crown molding). If you missed it, here is the post about all the trouble we had with this room: http://paintedbyeconomists.blogspot.com/2012/08/wallpaper-hides-many-surprises.html

It's done now though. Here are some pictures. First a before picture or two:

And here's how it looks now:

It looks a little yellower in the pictures than it does in person. It's so clean and fresh and nice. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated, but I'm so glad it's done. Hooray! I'm not sure when, after that experience, we'll get to the wallpaper in the guest bedroom. Possibly not until kid #2 is on the way. Who knows. Maybe we'll feel ambitious in a couple months and tackle that one. It can't be as bad. Even if the walls are equally beat up, it is much smaller. And the wallpaper is normal stuff, not horrible hay embedded ugliness.

Carousel Room

I decided the theme of my daughter's room should be carousel, since she loves animals (at not quite two, she had no input in the choice, but seems to approve). I found a cute, if complicated, carousel border stencil. I put a fresh coat of light blue paint on the room during the painting extravaganza, so it was all ready for decoration when my mom visited.

There isn't much of a story to tell, this project went pretty smoothly, so I'll just show pictures.

Wallpaper Hides Many Surprises

I started stripping the wallpaper from the master bedroom several weeks ago. I knew my husband didn't care as much about it, but I really wanted our bedroom walls painted before I started work. I considered it the ugliest room in the house. Here's a picture:

 I was hoping I could just do the job myself. I couldn't. This was, in part, the fault of our daughter who quickly decided that mommy working up high on the ladder instead of playing was simply not okay. But mostly it is the fault of the room itself.

There were two types of wallpaper to deal with, a solid blue layer on the bottom and a weird grassy top layer. The bottom layer pulled off like a dream. Once the wooden trim was removed from the middle of the room, it pulled off in large sheets, leaving no scraps behind. The grassy layer, on the other hand, was stubborn. Sometimes it pulled up just fine, other times it ripped up into a pile of strings that clung to the walls in bits. They weren't hard to get up with the wallpaper remover, most of the time, but there were a lot of little bits.

Still, the job seemed like one I could get done myself, if only my daughter would let me have a little time each day (which she, of course, would not). But then I started scrubbing the walls to get the extra adhesive off. And I scrubbed, and I scrubbed. It was amazing how little I got done in the time I spent. And there were still stubborn little bits of wallpaper here and there that I hadn't gotten to yet. I needed help.So my husband started helping after my daughter went to bed. Part of the reason the scrubbing took so long is that this nasty brown stuff would get our water dirty almost instantly. We asked my father in law about it and he thought we were scrubbing too much and were actually scrubbing off some of the drywall paper, then was puzzled that so much stuff was coming off with water. We discovered the answer on the third wall, when there was finally enough of it in one place to detect a pattern. It was old, decayed wallpaper. Three layers of old decayed wallpaper.

Here's what it looked like on the wall:

And the stuff that flaked off under my sponge:

They not only wallpapered over it, which is standard for these old houses, but in many places plastered over it with drywall mud or something of the sort. I washed more of it off, but then we took the electric sander to the walls, since our ultimate goal was to get the walls smooth enough to paint, not necessarily to get all the junk off of them. That old wallpaper made clouds of dust, so now our bedroom looks like it's experienced a dust storm as well.

And that's not all that was hiding under the wallpaper. We had holes. Some of them may have been knocked out sometime after the wallpaper went on, but some of them must have been there and they just wallpapered over it.

Hole 1: 

Hole 2:

Hole 3:

Hole 4:

We're not done yet, so no pictures of the finished product. Hopefully soon.We had a handyman come in to fix the big holes and I'm in the process of fixing the smaller ones. Then we get to paint and finally put our room back together.

A Revolving Cast of Contractors

We have done a lot of work on our house already, and we want to have a lot of work done by professionals as well. Despite not having any money yet (my husband's first paycheck comes Friday), we are having a parade of contractors come through to give us estimates. Someone came last Friday to estimate how much it would cost to put in ductwork for central AC, we visited a cabinet showroom over the weekend. Yesterday we had a flooring person by to estimate the cost of refinishing our floors. Tonight another HVAC person comes, then we have two more flooring people over the weekend. And we still haven't found a general contractor or handyman that is both professional enough to return calls and willing/able to fix the wall in our kitchen.

Since we can't afford to get all this done at once, once we have all the quotes in hand we will have to decide what exactly we want done and when.