Bring out your dead

I'm not dead yet.

Despite my absence, I'm really not dead yet. (I'm feeling much better).

I used to consider myself an organized person. Almost overly organized. Spreadsheets and lists are a compulsion. But sometimes it takes me a while to get into that mode. Take our house for example. No finished rooms = no proper place for anything = big disorganized heaps everywhere. As a result, every project takes much longer than it ought because of the time I spend wandering around the house muttering, "I know I just saw that hammer somewhere."

So, basta. Like everybody else in the world, I've made organization a priority for the new year. I've come up with separate lists (I wasn't kidding about the lists!) of things to do while Clara's asleep and for when she's awake. Lest you think I abandon her completely all day long, know that I still spend the vast majority of her waking hours playing with and loving on the little rugrat.

I've been working on the foyer/front hallway area the past couple of days. The biggest improvement was to get rid of the bags of aluminum cans piled by the door. We used to leave a bag of cans on our front steps for whoever to take and recycle for cash, but we found out that our church collects aluminum cans to help fund their food pantry. I could never find any information about dropping them off, so they just accumulated. I finally got the necessary info and got rid of an entire trunkful of cans within the hour. It felt good! All of the holiday decorations I bought (on clearance, naturally) and plunked down in the hallway have been relegated to the attic crawlspace. I now have a relatively clear space where I can place a workbench and embrace my inner OCD tendencies to organize the hundreds of screwdrivers I can never find. At least it doesn't look like an episode of Hoarders anymore.

Not our entryway.

Baby steps.

MIA

Eesh. Looks like I've been MIA for a month. Sorry. We've been busy with winter and holiday preparations. No huge projects, but things that needed to get done before the cold sets in. We mowed the lawn a final time, cleaned up the yard and back porch, removed/drained the hose, put an insulated cover over the hose bib, covered all accessible plumbing supply lines with pipe wrap (a much bigger project than it sounds like), fixed our basement furnace (because of Tom's brilliance, we didn't even have to call a furnace company, which saved us at least 60 bucks), and got our security system fixed. The monitoring unit they originally installed was junk and continually gave us a "communication error" message. The siren would go off, but it wasn't sending the alarm information to the security company. They're giving us a few months service and upgrading our motion detector to a pet sensitive one for free. It was a favorable resolution to what has been an annoyance for several months.

I was also busy baking for Thanksgiving at Tom's work. I made a big double batch of pumpkin scones and a Mississippi mud pie. (The mud pie was very nearly a disaster. I unwittingly bought one box of instant and one box of cook-and-serve pudding. The recipe called for mixing the two together, which I did before I realized the difference in preparation. Trying to cook instant pudding just results in burned pudding. Bad news. Leave it to me to perfectly execute a from-scratch recipe but totally botch a box of pudding.) We'll be traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, so no big family ordeal for us. We'll be celebrating Thanksgiving together as a family of three for the first time, and that is something for which I'm truly thankful.

On the fence.

I've eliminated a lot of fencing options, but there are still plenty of designs and variations left to ponder. First there's the fence panel shape to consider. There's curved concave:

stepped concave:


convex:


and straight:



Then there's the post style. You can choose to add moulding:


cut the ends:


add a cap:


or a finial:


or cut it lower than the pickets so it all but disappears:


And if that wasn't enough, you still have to decide on pickets. There's dog-eared pickets:


gothic style pickets:


pointed:


and flat:


and any shape you can imagine:

not to mention your choice of picket width and spacing. You can even alternate picket heights:


Is it any wonder that I get utterly overwhelmed with the choices?

The plan

After much nagging insistence, I finally convinced my sister, a landscape designer, to draw up a plan for my new flower bed. My requests:

1. Peonies! Beautiful, beautiful peonies. I love the big blooms and am fortunate enough to live in a perfect climate for growing them.

2. Low maintenance. Do I even need to explain why?

3. No reds or deep pinks to clash with the brick of the house and flower beds.

Here's what she came up with:


I don't know if you can read the labels, but the big pink circles are peonies, the green is iris, the yellow is tulips, and the blue is crocus. Since she didn't do any specs for exact varieties of the plants, it was up to me to make sure I selected plants with different bloom times. March blooms:


April blooms:


May blooms:


I couldn't find peony root stock locally, so I ordered those online. I got two different varieties, the Solange:


and Sarah Bernhardt:


Hopefully all the colors will work together and not fight each other for attention. My mom assures me that "peonies thrive on neglect," so it might be something even I can manage. I can't wait for spring to show them off!

Tah dah!

Building this tiny little wall (a measly 50 linear feet) has taken so long I can't even remember when the whole process started. Alas, the bricks are done. There is still much to be done, so this isn't a true before-and-after. I still have to build ANOTHER one and build the fence. Hopefully I've learned enough from the first raised bed to make the next one go faster. Anyhow, here's how it looked before:

And here is the much-anticipated wall in all her glory:


Yeah, pretty unimpressive for as long as it took me. I made lots of mistakes (like deciding to build this thing in the first place), but let's just call it charm, shall we?

Nope, still not done.

I've had a lot of people stop by to check on the progress of our little project. As it has been built, reactions have evolved from, "What in the heck is that?" (when we were digging the trench) to "Are you building a flower bed?" to "You sure know what you're doing!" to "Are you for hire?" and "You've been out here all afternoon. Here's a cold Pepsi to drink." That's a good sign, right?

This is not an update.

I'm only half-breaking my promise not to update until the wall was completed. It's been cold and rainy here, so building the wall has been a no-go. However, I did get a visit on Monday afternoon just as I started working outside from a previous owner! I could tell he is the sort of person who loves to talk and tell stories, so I picked his brain about the house. Some things I found out:

1. The bricks we've been digging in the yard weren't there originally.

His brother (who is now 66) installed them, so they've probably only been there for 30 years. Yeah, *only* 30 years. The family owned a construction business (the largest in town at the time), and whenever they had to dig up roads or alleyways, he'd gather the bricks and use them in the yard. That explains why there are so many different stamps on the bricks.

2.
The bricks that I found more recently, buried next to the sidewalk, simply lined a flowerbed. The flowerbed contained 4 rosebushes, 2 of which still exist.

His green-thumbed grandmother planted them, and they're over 100 years old.

3. I speculated that the side porch was not original, due to the different mortar thickness and color and the fact that it's not integrated into the pilaster very well.

I was partially right. He told me that a drunk driver ran into it, but that it was rebuilt the way it was. So, the work is new (relatively), but the design and materials are original. He also said that the original owners had run short on money when building the house next door, so their porches were done in wood instead of brick.

4. A mysterious pole in the side yard, that our neighbor warned us could be a vent (for what I don't know) and we therefore shouldn't remove it, is just part of an old clothes line. It's probably not even anchored in cement, so it should come out pretty easily.

5. According to him, the state gave them virtually no time to clean out the house before a forced sell date. I can only assume there were back taxes owed on the property. He said they threw out all sorts of historically significant items, including original blueprints to local landmarks (remember, his family owned a construction company) including the stadium (the original home of what is now the Detroit Lions). Being a lover of historic architecture, knowing these were thrown away breaks my heart.

And the absolute BEST part is that he's going to give us some old photos of the house and surrounding area! I may be a total architecture nerd for loving such things, but I won't apologize for it.