365 days later

This is what we are working on this week:
Making sure there are no bodies buried in the garden in a shallow grave,
Picking old paint from nooks and crannies in the beam,
Sanding primed cupboards
& bathing some rocks

I will not bore you with these gruesome pictures.

Instead I will share with you some of  my favorite pictures & memories from the last year.
In almost no particular order.

Moving day: have plants will travel

365 sunsets a year

Before: A blank page in a coloring book

After!

A dog for a day

After a hard days work, we rest and ponder.

Sunset kisses

Dinner every night on the BBQ

Fred loves his greens

A glimpse thru the garden gate

More than I ever dreamed of.

The perfect subjects for learning to use my camera

 Flowers make good models, so much patience

Quince next door

Sunflower detail

Poppy love

A few of my favorite things

Travis does not approve holding my flowers, but I do!

Patio hijinx

Snow greens

And back to spring rains

Patio Completion

Finally! A project completed!

It all started with a badly timed leaking water line

+ 1 plumber

- loads of cinderblocks

+ inspiration

+ 96 stones

x 100lbs each

+ a new truck

+ several loads of sand & gravel

+ Travis' skills =

Warning: These pictures may make you dizzy with all my turning and clicking.


We loved the look of the little charcoal stones, but when they are dry they look terrible. Good thing we get alot of precipitation. You can see in this picture a dry stripe from the gate being opened when it started raining. Pretty shiny black turns in to BLAH gray once dry.


North side looking east

 We changed our plans for the pattern of little black stones several times due to space available and spacing between them. I wanted a pattern, but in the end it didn't happen like that.

Facing north

It was slightly snowing the day after completion. That is one of the reasons it took so long to finish.
It was only about 20 stones short all thru the winter.

facing  south

I like things to be even and centered but unfortunately we weren't this far ahead in our plan when Travis installed the underground hose. I am more than happy to fore go my need for even since I won't  have a hose stretched across the patio every spring/summer/fall to water the garden.

East Side



The edges aren't pretty yet--that is my job.
Along with filling the spaces with soil and ground cover...again

From the slider-facing ---oh who cares!



I gained an extra 60 sqft of garden space! Here it still looks unfinished to me since the sand/gravel is still down. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle all that extra space once we get started on the garden.
Last year we had less than 1/2 the ground tilled before planting time, this year we plan on finishing the space. From 150 sq ft to close to 600!

Garden side

I get to buy a new plant to put in front of the hose hidey!

Must be evergreen, full sun and drought tolerant since it is under the eaves a bit.

I was soo proud of my groundcover last October. Little star creeper is a pest to some gardens but not mine. It is a steppable, its green and has little flowers... will even survive down to 0 degrees..

Found a couple little snails during the week but didn't know the damage they could do.

One day I noticed a small patch was missing... and within a week it was gone.

Pic on left was October, right was Feb.

Now I get to go buy it all again and try again.

Along with learn snail control methods.

I even wrote a blog on how to save money and spread it yourself!

This is an unknown shrub that came with the house. Anyone know what it is?
 It needs to be shaped badly and possibly moved.
It would probably be a death sentence If I tried that with out details...but then again--look at the ground cover I killed.

Rewinding
Here is the start and finish of 2010

And here is where he left it in September. Back when my ground cover was still thriving.

Quite the weight lifted from his shoulders. This was the day he finished the patio:

Since Travis was "resting"  I decided to snap some pics of my daffodils

More blogs to come! I (almost) promise!

2010 in review- THE GOOD

Obviously I did not include "Stop procrastinating" in my resolutions or else this may have been posted a month ago. In reality I have even procrastinated making any resolutions!

So going with the December flow and taking the month off of working on the house, this unfortunately counted blogging. So here I am--failing my first year end blog... posting it sometime in early January.

In keeping notes on our first year in our first house a review of sorts is needed. Not a lot has been happening around Castle Debauchery recently due to a variety of excuses reasons.

It is winter.

It is wet.

We are tired.

Work is busy.

We have been slightly depressed  hibernating.

But!!!No more!!! Back to work!

I have tried to write this blog for a month now, editing it 32 times and I am still having a hard time ending it on a positive note.
So I will start with The Good!




#1 The Bills.



What you say? How are bills good? What is a GOOD kind of bill?

The PAID kind.
The Paid on time with no fussing kind.
The kind that is $0

I try not to talk about money here.. but as you know-dirt costs money.
Good weed free dirt anyway!
And so do home repairs, upgrades and just getting our house to a level of cleanliness we can live with.

We have successfully lived within our means even with all the disasters and unforeseen repairs that we didn't notice, and the 'I must do this NOW before I tear my hair out' projects. (Travis does not approve this sentence.)

And the best part:
We even got to entertain our friends many times. Many many times. Maybe a few too many. (I will totally blame my lack of progress recently on our awesome friends)

For this we have made some sacrifices. Some went easily, others are still taunting my dreams.
Some of the things we gave up: sushi together, pedicures, buying books, Christmas 2010, birthday gifts all year, treating friends to dinners out and any dates that don't include $5 hot dog deals at Home Depot.
But those hot dogs ARE fantastic and we are even saving time by multitasking at HD.


#2 The Garden

The one thing we could call finished. No matter how much or how little you plant and harvest- THAT is a garden. It produced quite well. It was as big as we could make in the time allotted and it did it quite successfully.

We harvested from it all summer and fall. It was just about our only true success of the year. I was so thankful to have SOMETHING to take our mind off our other projects. Every time we stepped outside, it gave us something new to think about and look at. Now that the gardener seed has been planted in our heads, we will double the garden in size this year and hope it is as successful as last year.

I had never really planted anything in the earth before we moved here and now I cannot get enough of the garden blogs. In fact I have started following too many to keep up with! I have learned so many things I have never even previously thought about during these last 9 months. I look at landscapes and other yards in the neighborhood in a completely new way. Look at that--I'm growing, like my garden!




Even though it now looks like this:

It once was a source of comfort and joy like this:



#3 The Patio



And let us not forget the garden viewing platform.



Even unfinished and wintery it gives us joy with ice crystal like rorschachs.

Do you see what I see?

A valentine

A partridge in a pear tree

You choose!

 It has truly undergone an amazing transformation all the while keeping Travis out of trouble. At 100lbs a stone, Travis got to continue working out and put his truck to work as well!

 Back when we moved in:

Cinder blocks past.

First snow in March/April 2010

First snow on new patio Dec 2010

It has made us value our money even more than before. Even though we made some money selling used cinder blocks(there is seriously a huge market for this--who would have thought?) we still forked out over the course of its creation at least $700. It made us count our money in stones!

While debating cooking dinner it becomes a battles of stones...

4 stones to eat out vs dinner in with food from garden only costs a 1/3 of a stone.

A tank of gas costs me 5 stones, and Travis 7 stones.

A trip to Starbucks? One. Whole. Stone.

You see where this is going? It is so true.

This patio was one of those surprise projects which stemmed from a terrible problem that cost even more money. But I will save that one for the next post.

Stay tuned for part 2 of 'The Good, the Bad & the Ugly'

Music to my ears

When I arrived home from work last night this is what I heard from the driveway:

I didn't even mind that the door was locked and I had to load in groceries myself. Simply amazing progress.

This is where he was an hour before:

Working on the far beam now since that is the ladder available.
The ladder on loan is loaned out to the loaner. Sad but true. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry. It is an embarrassing situation that needs to be documented.

I have to believe that we are farther than 50% on the beams now and all the work on the far wall was done in 2-3 hours this week.
Remember--I don't get to live upstairs til the sanding is done so this is very exciting for me. Even though recently someone told me the basement is "homey" I beg to differ. As much as a basement CAN be "homey" that is true, since we live in it. But isn't "homey" how you describe something small and stuffy in a nice way? Much like "quaint" and "rustic".

Oh and I don't always talk like a parrot(Peek a boo! in the video) Old habits die hard. Long live Zen the Orange Winged Amazon!

Back story on the beam for anyone reading that hasn't heard us complain about it:
When we bought the house, the beams,  the beautiful solid old growth  (pine?) wood beams were....
PAINTED white!!!
A terrible terrible shame that Travis was intent on setting right from the minute we saw them.
As you can see in the pics below compared to above, he has spent 52 hours standing on a ladder stripping, scrapping and sanding. Only 12 more or so to go! It probably took whomever painted them less than an hour to create this great character building event for Travis.



Travis does not approve this beam



Gloves off

Where do YOU keep your garden gloves?

I keep mine 2 steps from the door, much to Travis's dismay.

He would like them out of sight, but for me it's always out of sight, out of mind.
Please note that there are 3 pairs of gloves in this picture: REALLY dirty garden gloves from last week that needed to dry, gloves that Travis uses for laying stones, and the current pair I've been using. The important part of that is that Travis has admitted defeat and now leaves his gloves in the appropriate spot.

If I put them "away" I would have to think twice about throwing them on for a 2 second task. It would result in dirt under my nails and washing my hands yet again and THAT would lead to a higher water bill.
(I'll use that the next time he sneers at my dirty gloves gracing the porch "But honey--I'm saving money!)
Or putting off the task until I have a larger task to merit going to find the gloves, possibly even unlocking the shed, which would include getting my keys from inside... All to pull some weeds or transplant something. Which would lead to putting it off til the weekend! Where I would shake my head that I had put it off at all because here it just took me 10 minutes and now I have all this time to do other things(which isn't a terrible thing).

I like to keep them with a little shovel and the pruning sheers. Maybe they could all go in a cute useful little bucket by the backdoor. Now I get to shop for a cute pail!

So I ask the gardeners: Are yours in the shed hiding away or are they always in plain sight? Reading some of these lovely gardening blogs recently--I wouldn't be surprised if some of them don't even use gloves. Or maybe the gloves have formed to their hands?