In-a-gadda-da-vino baby!
Tina and I have been very busy. (I guess anyone who's ever bought an old house would read this and say "Yeah, duh!")As she already mentioned we went to the country fair and I got cooked. Not baked, more like broiled. Every weekend stuff happens here, and in between stuff we're finding things we can do on the house with our limited funds.
We already bought the laminate flooring (at $.99 a sq foot. What a deal!) and have been laying that down in the office. We've finished that room and will be starting on the living/dining room this weekend. We plan to have it finished by Wednesday.
We've decided that our office is going to be the coolest room in the house. We put some furniture in there while we were moving everything out of the living room to rip up the carpet and it looks great, even though it's a disaster area. We envision the way it will look with our desks in there and the light fixture replaced, drywall and painting completed, decoration done and light streaming in through the French doors (Freedom doors! HA!) as we sit and update the blog. I hope the reality is as good as our vision of it.
One of our ongoing and inexpensive projects has been struggling to kill certain things in the garden, to no avail. There are some things currently growing in there that aggressively cling to life. This is bad because a lot of those things are things we don't want to grow. It's also good because the things that we DO want to grow are doing pretty well considering both Tina and I have black thumbs.
Our rose bushes got sick about a week after we moved in and we had to cut them all back to "stick bushes". Now they're thriving and blooming like mad. There are so many buds on them I can't count them all.
I think if someone brought by a dead animal we could bury it in our yard and a few days later it would come back to life. Take that Stephen King!
Now the pics!
Since we both have black thumbs, we decided we needed black plants so they look like they're supposed to be that way. :)
Luckily we also read that the Victorians were obsessed with black plants so it's appropriate for the house! Our neighbors are going to LOVE us!
Check out this cool plant we got at the Saturday market!
It's called a Black Mondo. It's even got a cool name!
We're also planning to get some black calla lillies in the future.
We will have the best Halloween house ever!
Next up is one of the aforementioned stick bushes.
This rose bush has gone from nearly dead to completely mad.
It's alive!
ALIVE!!!!
There are 4 rosebushes in our yard in total. All of them were near death. My favorite (and I think Tina's too) is a creeper near the driveway. We need to get an arbor under it because right now it has nothing to crawl except for the tree next to it. It was also nearly dead and lived as a stick bush. Now it gives us beautiful deep red roses. You really can't appreciate them by the picture. They're much different in person and the color is a lot deeper.
Here's another of the roses, this was the worst of any of them and has been a little slower in coming back to life.
In addition to the roses, we have TONS of lillies. We have white calla lillies, and then a bunch of other lillies that I don't know the names of. I think some of them are day lillies but I don't know which. As I mentioned, we will also be adding black calla lillies to the mix at some point, but it's going to be after a complete re-landscaping. Tina and I really like the dark reddish ones. The orange and yellow ones have only been allowed to live because they have neat dark bits on the insides.
Parade of lillies!
First up we have orange with reddish and yellowish bits inside:
Next we have dark orange that looks stupid pink in this picture, but it's not:
Here's the yellow with the dark bits:
This one is our favorite. In person, it's a dark reddish-purple:
And another view:
We have no idea what the heck these are, but we LOVE them!
They're not usually this blurry in person:
We're not sure what this is, but it's a neat color, so it lives:
And finally we have a neat little flowery thing that looks blue in person. The leafy stemmy bits are so dark purple they're almost black. It looks much different in digital reproduction:
This is what happens to plants we don't like:
That was a huge pile of random growing crap. We didn't like any of it and could barely separate plants from weeds on that little hilly spot, so Tina destroyed it.
Dark Angel of Frenzied Loppers!
All of you plants better shape up! Just ask the rhododendrons!
Before we took an axe to them, this picture would have looked like a great big bush. You really would not have seen any ground at all. It's amazing how much land we lost to that thing.
Also of note is the great big slate boulder in the corner. I'm trying to figure out how to move it somewhere we can enjoy it a bit more. I like to sit on it and I think it needs to live near a fire pit. It's just in a rotten place and I think it weighs about 2 tons.
I think that the grape vines are planning on staging a revolt. I have nightmares that one day we will be walking by and they'll reach out and grab us and squeeze the people juice out of us to make renovator wine.
We've also sent the wisteria to a better place. No pictures to honor it because I didn't want to get a view of the horrible abomination of a house next door to us. This is in keeping with history. Any of the pictures we've seen of our house from 189x also cut off right at the point of showing the corner of the house next door. Although I'm willing to bet that back then it actually looked like a proper Victorian and not a doublewide like it does now.
And just so this doesn't turn into a garden blog we have pics of the new floor!
We've been busting our asses on this and we finally have a room finished! Those cuts around the bay windows have been super tricky, but I think we did a good job. Now we have to do the living room and dining room, which together are about three times the size of this one.
We also have a new roof!
Unfortunately it's not the wood shingle roof that it should be, but it's waterproof and that's what's important right now. Because of the pitch of the roof and the difficulty involved, this roof is much more expensive to cover than your average ranch would be. Typically, asphalt roofing would run somewhere in the are of $5k. Our beautiful Mansard roof? In the area of $9k+! Wood shingles can wait until I win the lotto, or have a rich relative kick the bucket.
The house is also much straighter now. We had a beam (or two) beneath the house replaced and it shifted the entire house. It may not be as obvious if you haven't looked at it everday and it doesn't help that our last picture of the house before the repair was already crooked and at a weird angle. Trust me when I say there's been a vast improvement. Our bedroom door wouldn't close at all before. Now? No problem. Saves me the work having to plane and rehang it.
Also of note: No satellite dish on the roof!
When the roofers were bringing in the materials, the guy in the supply truck backed into my car.
Fortunately for both of us, they were really cool about ordering the part for me on their dime, so it's as good as new now.
Random picture of hungry birds!
And with that, the camera is empty and I end this post. Happy now Robin?
posted by Unknown @ Thursday, July 13, 2006
