Garden Time

I'm finally wrapping up work on the outside of the house for now. That means dealing with the most embarrassing parts - the fence and former playground area. The fence gates were a bad design and sagged badly. I had an idea to support them with angle iron and some cable, and it worked great on the smaller, single gate. On the double, the cruddiness of the design + being however many years old outweighed the strength of the angle iron, and it broke the support. The new fix for the double gate is to just not use it. It'll be replaced when the whole fence goes away. I would really like to have a fence made out of brick so I never have to deal with this again. Every house I've lived in had a wooden fence of some sort, and if I wasn't able to catch the fence when it was young it seems like it needed all sorts of repairs.

And now the garden... You may remember from way back in the first post of this blog there was a playground in a back corner of the yard. It was part of the listing for the house, actually and much to my surprise it was gone at closing day along with numerous fixtures. Long story, but that nearly prevented closing from happening at all until they made things right. The previous owners even took the mulch and wooden borders that were installed in the ground, leaving only landscape fabric. It's been an eyesore since day one and I had to make a decision... sod that part of the yard or do something else with it. If I put in grass it'll be difficult in the future if I want to do something else there, or I could plant a garden and if we want to put in a playground or whatever it won't be so bad to change it over. I went for the garden.

These are pictures of how the eyesore looked before. You can get an idea of how overgrown it was getting by tall grasses. Surprisingly, the landscape fabric wasn't that damaged.

I installed edging around the border and had 4 yards of pine mulch put in. The truck was able to drive right up to it and dump everything in the garden so spreading it all around was easy. The area weighs in at 460 square feet at least. We're growing sweet corn, garden beans, spinach, okra, peanuts, black cherry and regular tomatoes, orange mint, spearmint, and garlic chives. I also plan on getting a pomegranate and pecan tree, but those will go at the side of the front yard.

Since all the outdoor tasks are complete and I've been waiting on car parts to come in I decided to start working on the living room. Whoever installed the trim in this house around 2002 used some huge nails to put it all in. They're about three inches long and installed at every stud. Corner blocks are held in with six to eight of them. It's a complete overkill and makes disassembling anything difficult. I'm really concerned about removing the crown molding because they're probably installed the same way.

I have all the baseboards out (held in place with only one nail each for now), but here's a preview of what I found underneath them. When I start pulling out the tile I honestly have no clue what I'll find. There's a repaired area to the left of and at the front door and it's unclear where the hardwood flooring was and wasn't. The flooring is a lot more level than I thought; it's the baseboards that weren't installed correctly, making everything appear out of level.

I'm probably going to finish installing all car parts that I ordered today, and will be able to finish planting the garden and working on another car tomorrow. Sometime this weekend I will probably start removing tile from the entry area and try to dig down through the subfloor so I can begin carefully removing the hardwood. My plan is to run three lengths of blue tape down the floor and slice it along every piece of wood so each row can be numbered. I'm also numbering the reverse side. With any luck the subfloor will be in poor enough condition so the hardwood can be carefully removed and stored until it's time to be reinstalled.

Pictures will start looking really interesting, really soon...

New Lights!

We finally have new outdoor lighting by the garage.

I really like it. We were having trouble finding lights that weren't an arm and a leg that are mid century modern or just modern/contemporary looking but ebay came to the rescue. The install is nothing to write much about... old lights come off, new lights go on.

I'm also finished painting. The only thing left to do are fascia boards on one wall. I was hoping the color would come out a bit darker, but this will be ok. It's nothing to lose sleep over. I also need to paint the shutters. They're going to be the same color they already are because the house came with about a gallon of the stuff.

The old landscaping fabric and grass has been pulled up and it'll be time to put in new fabric later this week. With any luck I'll have the area filled with river rock by the weekend and will be moving on to the next project. I'm going to clean up the area where there used to be a playground and lay the groundwork for a garden. At this point I have no idea what to plant, just... something. I'm also going to be repairing all 3 fence gates soon, so there should be another update this weekend with pictures of how everything came out. I'd also like to add a picture or two of the overall concept for the place viewed from the street if I have time to get it on paper by then.

Once this is done, that pretty much sums up the outdoor work that I'm doing this year. Then it's time to move on to car, truck and lawn mower maintenance and then on to the first big project for 2012... the living room and kitchen. I really have no clue how long it all will take. This could be quick, or be more difficult than I thought. At this point the 'while you're in there' stuff doesn't seem too bad and I really doubt there will be any structural issues beyond what I already know about because everything has been looked at so many times but we'll see.

Painting

Since the last update, for the most part I've been prepping the house for paint. I could have just thrown a layer of paint on the house and been done with it but in only a year or two it would be peeling because the older layers are in poor condition and the gutters weren't primed. I had to do the right thing and scrape / burn the old stuff off, and prime the gutters. This takes a lot more time than it sounds like it does. I focused more on the entry area than anywhere else because it's the most visible to us and anyone who comes over.

This is what it looked like both before and during the process. The grooves between pieces of siding were filled with paint and it was peeling away. The almond color around the old, ungrounded outlet is the color we decided to go with. I guess in terms of paint colors we've gone full circle back to the beginning. When I rework the front living room I'll put in grounded wiring and a new outlet.

This is another shot of the entry area. I cleaned up the area around the front door some, but since it's unclear whether we will replace only the actual front door or the front door + frame (likewise for the windows to the right) I didn't remove all paint back to the door itself. 

We plan on getting a door kit from Crestview Doors to replace whatever style door we have now. I would like to use the escutcheon that I bought off eBay that's almost too perfect to install, but it may not be compatible with my favorite door kit so we'l have to see... Replacing the door will come at the end of the living room/kitchen project anyway because the height of the floor by the front door will be changing, and that dictates what size door and side light we get.





















This is how the entry area looks now since I haven't painted beyond priming yet. You can see the lines for the paneling once again and there's no more peeling paint. If we decide we can't live with the wood up above I'm more likely to replace it than scrape the paint from it because it's just thin plywood. The old plywood would be recycled as flooring in the attic instead of being thrown away. In the long run it's not so important anyway because once it's time to re-roof we'll probably change the entire orientation of the roof and if that happens, there goes the plywood.

My plans beyond painting are to clean up the landscaping and repair our horrible fence. Then comes car maintenance and after that the big projects start up... With any luck that's only a month away.