Fruits of our Labor

Monday, 01 June 2009

Mission accomplished! Operation: Garden Party was a complete and utter success, as we hosted our very first back yard gathering this weekend with my family. The past two weekends have been grueling, with almost every daylight hour devoted to yard work.  Photos below, but I wanted to give a big THANK YOU at the top of this entry to everyone who helped out with all these projects. Especially January's dad and step-mother, Rex and Shirlene, without whom this project would have taken twice as long and been done half as well.

First up, the most ambitious part of the project: the back patio.  Last I mentioned it, the back half of our yard looked a little like this:

After digging down 5" in a 15' x 8' area, we were ready to start building the patio.  We laid down a 3" bed of crushed limestone and smoothed it as best we could. Our original plan was to place the patio stones directly on the limestone, but we quickly realized that the large rocks weren't going to provide a very stable base for the stones.  Rex and Shirlene went out for leveling stand while my dad and I did our best to tamp down the limestone by hand.

Once we got the leveling sand, we started the painstaking effort in laying down the patio stones. It's not as simple as spacing them; You have to pay attention to the overall direction they're going, making sure the seams line up so it will look good, plus you need to keep a close eye on the overall direction the patio will slope. If you don't, you'll end up with giant pools of water every time it rains. We tried to design the patio so it sloped toward the back corner of the yard, where the excess water would go to the surrounding garden.

All told, the process of spreading out the limestone and placing the stones took just about 9 hours.  To make sure the stones stayed put, I spent the next week sweeping playground stand across the entire patio, filling in the cracks between the stones, and wetting it down so it would settle.  Add in a couple of lavender plants, mulch, a used fire pit from Criagslist, and patio furniture courtesy of IKEA and local garage sales, and the patio project was finally complete!

Finally, we got our square foot gardening boxes all filled in and ready for growing.  I'll give you some updates and a rundown on what we're growing a little later on, but a quick picture for now:

As you can see, the lawn filled in fairly well where we put the patch seed, but there are still a few bare spots that need to be filled in, and the back yard will be perfect!

This past weekend was also devoted to getting the front yard back in shape after getting our water line replaced several weeks ago.  Once again, Rex and Shirlene came to our rescue with their roto-tiller and turned what would have been an all-weekend job into a 6 hour job.  Behold, our front yard, completely redone and covered in grass seed!

So, after a little over a month, we're about 95% done with our big yard projects, and it feels pretty great. It was a ton of work, but it was absolutely worth it for all the fun we're going to be able to have out in our yard now. Hopefully we'll be able to do the little work required to maintain it in the future, rather than lose whole weekends like this again.

Photoshop Fight 2: Star Trek

Thursday, 28 May 2009

Say you're waiting for that large file to upload, or for that new build to finish compiling. What do you do with that little downtime in your day? I'll tell you what we do -- we play Photoshop Tennis!

This weeks theme was "Star Trek." Not that we have to stick with that theme throughout the competition, but that's where it starts. Click through to check out the entries so far, and judge away!

Read more: Photoshop Fight 2: Star Trek

Progress

Friday, 22 May 2009

The last time I mentioned our back yard, it was in pretty sad shape. I made a public vow that day to turn the yard around and get it into summer barbecuing condition. While we aren't quite there yet, I'm pretty happy with the progress that's being made, and I wanted to get an update on the record.

The biggest sore spot has by far been the "mud pit" in the back area, where the previous owners had an in-ground garden. We moved the garden into raised beds, but never really did anything to clean up the area left behind.  Our renovation plans for that area revolve around a patio that we want to get put in. It's the perfect spot, due to the nice combination of sun and shade it gets.  The good news on that front is that the area has been completely cleared of all weeds and I've been in the process of prepping it for the patio over the past two weeks.  

I still have about a 8'x 4' area left to dig out, but by Saturday we'll have a 8' x 15' area that is dug 5" deep, ready for the patio to be built. We've got 2 tons of crushed limestone ready to be delivered bright and early Saturday morning, and my father-in-law has volunteered to lend me his expertise and truck in getting it built out. If all goes according to plan, we'll be enjoying Memorial Day on our newly completed patio.

The other big areas we wanted to tackle were the bare spots in the lawn and the secondary mud pit that was developing below the raised gardens.  I dug out the area below the square foot gardens and installed a mulch bed, spread some grass seed around, and things are looking markedly better already.

We still have a few bare spots that need to be patched, but you can see that the boxes have been filled back up with soil and are ready for planting. That will probably happen sometime next week, thanks to the state of Virginia finally coming through on that tax refund I was due.

While we're not quite there yet, I'm pretty happy with the direction things are going back there. I love having a yard again, and I can't wait to get it back to a place where we can actually use it. Check back next week for some updates on the patio construction. Whether or not it all goes according to plan, there should be some good photos to share.

How I Spent My 2008 Tax Refund (Part 2 of 2)

Thursday, 14 May 2009

As if mourning the loss of our favorite tree weren't enough, last week we faced our biggest decision as homeowners yet: How to deal with the broken waterline running from the city line to our house.  The fine folks from the Columbus Division of Water said that our options were pretty much to either repair the damage -- which is an option if the area in need of repair is less than four feet -- or just replace the entire line. Our house is at least 90 years old, which means we have old galvanized pipes delivering water to the house. I say "at least," because there was apparently a fire at the records house in 1920, and any property that was build before that is simply listed as having been built in 1920. I understand that there are ways of tracking down the actual year built, but that's a project for another time.

The information we gathered over the next week was widely varied and left us even more confused than we were at the start of the process. The first proposal suggested replacing the galvanized piping with plastic piping, or possibly repairing it for about a third of the cost.  Both options seemed reasonable, so we thought we'd get a few more proposals in just to see if we could get a slightly better deal.  Instead, we got three proposals all recommending replacing our old piping with copper at a vastly higher cost. These estimates all came in about 40% higher than the original estimate using plastic.  At this point, I pretty much just started asking everybody their opinion on copper versus plastic. The copper people were saying that plastic will crack in the cold and will last 15 years at best, and the plastic people were saying that copper is overpriced and unnecessary.  The one thing everyone agreed on was that fixing the problem rather than redoing the whole line was an extremely temporary fix at best.  After much hand wringing, and a good bit of input from January's dad and uncle, we decided to go with the original proposal of replacing the galvanized piping with plastic pipe.  We scheduled the work for this past Friday and hoped for the best.

Mike and Matt showed up bright and early Friday morning with Bobcat in tow and got down to business.  First up was ripping a giant hole in the front yard to find the pipe close to the house.  Mike was awesome in explaining what he was doing all along the way, and Matt went out of his way to show us exactly what broke on the old piping and where the new pipe was going to go.

Things got a little hairy when they were connecting the new pipe to the city line. Apparently an old seal finally blew out in the process, and we had a little "water everywhere" situation.  That provided for a little drama, but didn't really last too long; Mike and Matt were able to get it under control fairly quickly with a little help from the Department of Water.  After replacing the seal, connecting the new pipe, and back filling the yard we were back in business!

What interested me the most in the whole process was the sheer amount of dirt that was left over. All that dirt was compacted into the ground, and when it was dumped back into the hole it left a giant mount of dirt about three feet tall.  Getting this dirt to "settle" back into the ground completely was a two-day process, but was fairly easy to do -- just jam a broom or painting pole into the dirt as far as you can, run a garden hose down the hole, and turn on the water until it backs up and starts running out the hole. After repeating this process in various places around the dirt pile, it had already shrunk to about half its original size. One more session of this the next day and it was almost level with the rest of the yard again.

On a side note, the big obvious repairs in our front yard gave us our first opportunity to meet a random blog reader! Fellow Clintonvillain Erica -- @orchidarea on Twitter -- has been keeping up with our renovations and passed by our house one evening as she was on her way home and we were stepping out to run some errands. She was nice enough to say "Hi" and give us a chance to put a face to a name.  I had assumed up to this point that I was writing pretty much exclusively for family (Hi Dad!) and friends (Hi Ben!), but it's good to know that we've got neighbors checking us out every now and then.  Drop a comment sometime, it's nice to know who's on the other end of this thing!

If you're interested in seeing the entire collection of photographs from the day -- which gives a pretty good picture of the entire process -- I have them posted up on my Flickr account. I guess time will tell whether or not we made the right decision in going with plastic over copper, but we're feeling pretty good about it for the time being. Despite all the stress of getting estimates, weighing our options, and having no idea what the best choice was, once we made the decision things went about as well as can be expected.  We still have dirt everywhere in our front yard and I see a lot of grass-seeding and yard work in our future, but it's good to know that we have our first major renovation as homeowners done and out of the way.