Archive

Blog Break

I feel like I haven’t posted in a while, but we’ve still been busy working on things around the house. We’ve been working on the bathroom bit by bit, but I think I’ll wait to post the photos until I feel like we’re done to the point where they’re worth showing. We’ve been painting the base board and medicine cabinet. I guess the medicine cabinet mirror alone took 3-4 days to prep…but more on that when it’s time to show.

Otherwise I guess we’ve done a little bit more garden work. We planted more vegetables in our “vegetable garden”: squash, another tomato, green pepper and a honeydew melon….

Squash and tomato garden bed

Squash and tomato garden bed

In the meanwhile the neighbors kudzu is doing fabulous. I keep trying to fling the growing vines back into their yard when they come onto our driveway. Then I try to go along the fence to tear the ones that are creeping through to our side. What do you do in a situation where your neighbors kudzu is out of control and you care more about it than your neighbor? We bought some weed killer that I’ve utilized a little bit on the neighbors kudzu, but there’s only so much I can reach. It’s a weird situation.

Neighbor's kudzu

Neighbor’s kudzu

The last few days I’ve been working on prepping a flower bed against the back house wall. I discovered a pack of sunflower seeds and a pack of phlox that we hadn’t used, so since we’re probably already past the point of being able to plant seeds I figured I’d at least give it a try. Before we just dug a hole and planted plants. Now that I have the proper tool (“cultivator”?) I’ve been prepping the bed, loosening all the soil, etc. We should have been doing that stuff all along, but since we’re not only first time homeowners, but also first time gardeners we’re still picking up new stuff. On that note, it’s amazing what all I’ve found while digging up the dirt! I feel like an archaeologist with the items I find. It mainly seems to be tons and tons of rusted nails, and tons of broken glass. Definitely a “WTF, what were these people doing??” moment! In the picture you can also see that we need to repoint our bricks. The mortar is crumbling and disappearing, but through our research we’ve discovered that it’s not as easy as putting new mortar in. Due to the age of the house the mortar and bricks used to be made of softer materials than today, and if the incorrect (modern) mortar is used it can damage the brick and therefore the foundation. They offer mortar testing for something insane like $500 – so we’re kind of at a point where we’re not sure how to proceed.

Sunflower seed bed

Sunflower seed bed

Other than that we’ve worked on slowly removing the giant pile of roof shingles that have been sitting by our shed. We’ve been putting a stack of them in our herbie curbie every week, so I think we should have another 2 or 3 weeks before we’re rid of it all. Much better than paying $300 for a dumpster. ;-)

And as I’m typing this it is finally raining. I don’t think it’s rained since my last blog shows the picture of the “drowning” plants. I mentioned the drought and rain deficit we’re having…and it’s only gotten worse. As a matter of fact, before today our deficit was greater than the rain we’ve had for the entire year! I’m sure after this rainfall we’ll have made up for some of it. Every day the news reports about watering bans or show trees whose leaves are crumbling because they’re dry and brown as though it was fall. Since our grass consists of weeds anyway we’re not too worried about our lawn (still trying to decide which type of grass we’d eventually like to get). It’s funny how much I never cared about rain until owning this house and garden. Before I was sad when it was a rainy day – now I know what it feels like when people are hoping for rain for the garden!

Enough for today. Like I said, I’ll post some pictures soon of our progress in the bathroom. I’m sure it won’t seem like much, but it’s been taking enough damn time!

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In and Around the House

So there’s been a few happenings in the last week…

Oh my, look how much our lavender has grown since we planted it! Juuuust kidding. When we planted the three little lavender plants they were quite pathetic looking already, but at least they were green and alive looking (See photo). Within a week all three plants shriveled up even more and turned into brown leafed and dead looking plants. Maybe we were a little fast with our decision, but we decided to tear them out and replaced them with some grown plants that we purchased at a local garden center. The one on the left is called “sweet” lavender, the one on the right is called “hidcote” lavender. Peeking in on the left is also some “red fountain grass” that we planted.

Lavendar

Atlanta has had a drought (already, and it’s not even summer yet!) with some 10 inch rainwater deficit. We haven’t had a good downpour since we started planting. We knew that there was some flooding in the area by the back steps because when the laundry extension was built they did not bother to calculate in the drain run that was going along the house. So now the water accumulates in a giant puddle (actually it looks close to a pond with the weeds in there!), including in our new flower bed. Everywhere I have read about lavender it says that the plants like very rough conditions, which includes dry soil and full on sun. With the standing water after a downpour I’m a little scared the lavender won’t be very happy in that place – I guess we’ll have to see how it grows or doesn’t.

Puddle

On the other side of the stairs we recently dug up the lost drain that is now blocked by the laundry addition. With the soil gone, or perhaps we just haven’t paid as much attention before when it poured, there seems to be quite a lake. The itty bitty green plant in the middle is a “weigela carnaval” that we planted there in hopes for it to grow large and hide our monster of an A/C unit.

Weigela

While we’re busy enough trying to keep up with our own house and garden we have also had to tackle the neighbor’s yard. A while ago it started off with one kudzu plant starting to creep up the side of their house. It was actually quite crazy to watch because I was able to literally count it going up one brick a day. Eventually the lawn mowing service came out and cut it down. But since then they haven’t come back and the lonely kudzu plant amidst the grass has turned into some grass plants amidst a kudzu field. And those little buggers just loooove to grow onto our driveway. And over our backyard fence for that matter. Since they say kudzu grows up to a foot a day (!) I have been going out there every few days to cut the plants that started coming onto our side. It’s really quite annoying.

Kudzu

So the other day we had some excitement…we kept hearing helicopters over our house. Finally we were curious enough and walked outside to see 2 news choppers hovering right above our house. In the evening news we found out there had been some car chase that ended in a street a block over from our house.

Helicopter

The gas company has come out and made a mess of our street. They’re upgrading the gas lines in our neighborhood from 5 lbs. to 57 lbs. of pressure or something crazy like that. This is where they dug up the gas line coming to our house…a couple hours later it was all covered up with dirt again.

Gas line replacement

When they changed the pipes at the street they also had to come to the gas meters at the house to upgrade the pipes and some converter there. That included a bright yellow pipe that we weren’t very happy about. After complaining to the workers they told us they would come and paint the yellow pipe. We were about to give up hope when they started working further down the street, but to our surprise we found the pipe painted two days later.

Gas line replacement

And last, but not least, we have also done some work inside the house! We finally got around to painting the window in the bathroom and a couple of days later the wainscoting. The prep work probably took longer than the actual painting itself. All that caulking and nail hole filling and sanding and refilling nail holes and re-sanding takes up a lot of time. Now we just have to finish painting the base board, which we waited on because we hadn’t caulked that part. It definitely makes a difference in how the bathroom feels.

Bathroom painting

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