Two Pallets of Rocks

Two pallets of rocks is enough to build a path, some stone walls, and then some.

In just a weekend, we replaced my plastic knife stake out with a lovely flagstone path and created a short stone wall between the sidewalk and our garden, and built the beginning of a corner garden.

It poured about an hour after we finished this project, so the rocks are now shiny instead of dusty. We still have quite a bit of rock leftover, so it will find its way towards edging some gardens in the backyard and maybe replacing the mud pit where we keep the garbage cans.

July: Cats, Carpets & Concrete

Everyone meet Fred. Fred showed up in March and endured a misguided stay in our living room for a night and decided he liked the outside better. Recently he's been spending hours a day in our backyard and has become quite friendly. Tentatively he's the fourth member of our little pack, as long as he decides to stick around. Dexter likes to sit in the window and watch for him and they bat at each other through the window.

This is probably Dexter's favorite spot in the house. With or without his buddy in the backyard.

Onto carpets, we scored our second great deal on a carpet at the Crate & Barrel outlet. I neglected to take a picture of this room when we got the new couch this spring, but it used to have a beige carpet, which didn't really do it for this room. The pattern brings a little needed life to the room. We have some art on order and plans for a DIY art project to further spruce up the cool palette. The beige carpet found a new happy home in the guest bedroom. It's doing a great job covering up the crappy floor.

The fence is down! Our curb appeal used to be negative. We're slowly working our way towards positive. We put in a couple gardens, did some serious work to thin out the day lilies, and finally the chain link fence came down! (*mostly) We're pilot testing not having a fence in the front, but we decided to leave a small portion up on the side of the yard between us and the apartment building. There's a can of spray paint just waiting to spruce that portion of the chain link up until we decide what to do. About the concrete, the City won't pick up the fence pieces unless it's free of concrete. Don't mess with a man holding a Sawzall removing concrete from fence posts. We now have more lumps of concrete in a pile in our backyard. I feel a "rock" sculpture coming on.

Negative curb appeal.

We're looking more respectable!

The result of an hour of yanking it out of the front yard and then Henry hacking it into appropriate sizes for trash pick up.

Random updates: Our garden can't handle the summer heat, plastic knives are decent stakes for setting out the path in the front yard, and our living room is slightly uncluttered for the first time in awhile.

The stump is gone!

The fence is up, the stump is gone and now all we have to do is figure out how to deter mosquitoes.

When we were first purchasing the house last August, this is what the backyard looked like

April Showers

Our front yard was pretty boring, in fact our house has negative curb appeal.

We're trying to fix that, see the post below about replacing the ugly fence. In the meantime I'll show you what a bunch of trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, a nursery and some serious hours of manual labor get you:

Note the growing collection of yard tools on the porch

This garden is pretty long, to the left is a couple rows of vegetables, which are pretty boring now, but I hope they look awesome later this summer.

This pathway is much more impressive in person.

We put a similar walkway on the other side of the house, but it isn't finished yet and after being there less than a day it was covered in bird crap, so I took a picture of the nicer looking one.

We took a break from digging holes in the ground to trim up dueling boxwood topiaries.

Can you guess which one belongs to Henry?

We went back to digging holes in the ground. This stump needs to come out, and we can't find anyone to pay to take it out (don't get me started on tree companies). Henry's been slowly chipping away at it using a combination of a chain saw, an ax, a sawzall and a shovel.

In non-garden news, we bought this table at a "flea market," I spray painted the frame black and now it's pretty sleek. Very DIY of me.

BAR 1/2 - Us 1/2

We formally submitted our application to replace the ghetto looking fence with a decent one at the end of March.

The links below don't exactly describe the full amount of ridiculousness that we had to go through just to get permission to replace our fence, but it's a start.

A video of our hearing our portion starts at 37:30ish. If you wish to see a 30 minute presentation on the wonderful architectural aspects of chain link fences you can start at 9:35. You will hear this phrase: "preservation isn't about the houses of great white men." It's must see TV.

Here's the staff report on our application. We have no opinion on the city's ability to maintain their property that apparently is not our property despite being inside our current fence line.

Bottom Line: we're scheduling the installation of the wood fence and have to work out some issues with our front fence.

Category: Hodge Podge

Let's play catch up!

Since our last post the house next door is almost completely built, we painted another room, I managed to take some catch up pictures (not all of which I can post today), and we started plotting a dream back yard! We even managed to get rid of the ugly red shed in the back.

We started talking to contractors again to help finish up the remaining work. Many feet of trim are needed and a bathroom in the basement needs to be either finished or demolished. I promise to be more diligent with pictures, I need to find a better internet connection since the pictures take a long time to upload.

We can now burn things in the backyard.

Flamingos dress up the backyard

Our pretty awesome closet.