Backyard, oh you beautiful thing~

We have an amazing backyard... it has just about everything we had desired: a nice concrete patch for the girls to ride their vehicles, a big open grass area for soccer and other tumbles, a nice yet ackward sprinkler system, pre-made veggie beds, mature fruit trees (fruit bearing.. apricot, grapes and two oranges), exhilaratingly aromatic roses, a shed and a great spot for a compost.

I have spent the better part of two weeks going through the backyard, weeding, mowing, edging, debudding roses, and giving the oversized plants a good trim.

Apricot..
Was one of my first victims, some of the branches had major wounds and were almost touching the floor. The way I saw it, I was amputating sick limbs that had the potential of draining the apricot's energy. I happen to love apricots, so I wanted to make sure we had nice, juicy, big fruits. Here are the before and after...

From Primer Dia Monhegan Way

From White Monhegan

Grass...
Dethatching has been quite a task, as I started it by hand at the edge.. there was more than 5 inches of accumulated grass trimmings! I have now quit the hand method and am considering more aggressive approaches to it. Haven't decided if I want to aerate it first and hose-dethatch or if I want to hire the job out and get it done now.

When I edged the lawn, it uncovered a few snail colonies... to be honest, I don't know if snails live in colonies or not, but it sure looked like it! I'm talking about bunches of snails in groups of about 15-20 snails piled on top of one another! Yuck!

Grapevine...
I cut back the grapevine pretty much to the stump. Tim prays every day that it live through my aggressive methods... I'm pretty sure it will be just fine, although it might take some more work. It needs training as it was left to its own devices. I'm thinking about a trellis that goes up the hill and uses some of that space to grow. I'm salivating with the idea of a good grape harvest as I tasted some of the fruit and it was deliciously sweet.

Some of the branches buried themselves and rooted themselves, we'll see how it starts growing.





Fruit? Flowers? Buh-bye!
I have taken out one of the hedges but am thinking about doing the same to a second one. Tim and I are of one mind.. if it doesn't bear food, has a great aroma or looks wonderful, it should serve a purpose or it doesn't have a place in our backyard. So long, useless hedges!

Veggie beds...
Right above the end of the grass, there are some veggie beds, covered with wonderfully black yummy looking dirt. I was so excited about these, it's a good size lineup!

From Monhegan Way

Yesterday when I was ready to plant the recovered strawberries from our last house, I started to loosen the soil and lo and behold, disappointment. There was about 1 inch of rich soil, then it was filled with landfill.. yes landfill. Pieces of concrete and building trash. After a couple of hours of useless labor, I quit that idea and planted them elsewhere. I think digging is not the way to go, I think I'll have to obtain topsoil and fill them up instead.

Half wall... be gone!

When we moved in our new house, we kept wondering what the builders (KB) had thought when they put in a monstruous half wall between the dining room and living room. Too tall to put a TV in it, too cumbersome to be a bar, too bizarre to be anything useful.

It had a death wish written all upon itself.

Craig and Tyler came with tool power and between Tim and them, they had the wall down faster than it could cry out for help. It was so amazingly overbuilt, you could have had the whole house on top of that!

As both Craig and Tyler are electricians, they got the wires all figured out and the rooms felt lighter almost immediately! So much better! I've been playing around with the drywall, knowing I'll mess up a few times before it turns out okay but hey, that's what learning is all about.

A few days later, my father in law came in, saw the bones of the half wall in our hauling pile and gave us the most feasible answer to the wall's intent... an aquarium!

I mean... still, who would have built a house model with an aquarium wall in it? Bizarre, if you ask me! Note that our house doesn't have any of the optional features of the model, so it wasn't an update, just a random wall included with the model. And, every house we visited with this model, independently on how clean and organized it was, had clutter on top of this half wall... I don't need a clutter wall, I already have enough clutter as it is!

Half wall... be gone!
Electric equipment and drywalling: $20
The help of your uncle and cousin... priceless!

Paint and colors...

After touring hundreds of houses (okay maybe I'm overstating the number, but it sure felt like thousands) I had settled on a green kitchen. Just about every kitchen that I saw in green I fell in love with, there is something about an airy lighthearted color when you're cooking and prepping and cleaning...

We purchased a zillion samples, thank God we don't have to pay too much for them. About 6 different greens and other neutral colors.. and a yellow. The yellow looked so good that every person that walked on our sample wall commented on how nice it looked. Irresistible as it turned, the kitchen and craft room have been painted sunny yellow with white moulding, near the white tile counters and backsplash. We haven't finished the yellow on top of the cabinets, as we'd have to stand on the counters and don't want our little girls watching that spectacle... or we'd find them climbing there all the time!

As I had been desiring green so much, I decided to use a quarter of paint I had purchased at the Habitat for Humanity Restore (http://shfh.org/hfh) for a buck in the laundry room. It looks amazing the contrast between yellow and green. I must like that combination as my very special college plates had yellow, green and blue in them... just about the same hues.

Around May there was a fun dinner at my Mother in Law's church, one of the items in the silent auction was a bucket full of painting supplies, half in faith and half in hope we'd buy a house sometime soon we made a $20 offer for it and obtained it. Brushes, rollers and all sort of nice goodies together with a $25 gift certificate to lowes was an incredibly good way to go! So all in all, the paint must have costed us about $50 alltogether, including samples and actual paint, painter's tape and spackle.

In the living room, we wanted to go with a cafe-au-lait color, something mellow and neutral that we could pair with a hefty chocolate color in the staircase accent wall. After a few samples, I decided to mix two galons of paint, also obtained at the Restore (http://shfh.org/hfh) and came up with my own mix.. which I loved. It was a little darker than I thought we wanted, but the rooms have so much light in them that they can withstand a darker paint color. I'm done for the most part, but am hoping Tim can help me with the upper trim.
Living Room paint, including samples.. $15

Goin' green! Bamboo here we come!

When we bought the property, it needed quite a bit of cleaning, so hands and knees we cleaned the floors, pumice stone scrubbed toilets and sinks, walls, ceiling, closets... we hired a professional for the carpets.

We had already decided on flooring, as the carpets were in a deplorable condition. We went for the Strand Bamboo - Natural from simplefloors (see http://www.simplefloors.com/) We were hoping for hardwood but we have a concrete subfloor and didn't want to meddle with either adding a plywood subfloor or having to use engineered hardwoods. Nothing against them, but a solid material seems more fitting for a household full of children who sooner than later will deeply scratch a natural floor.



The bamboo samples we had checked out scratched very easily. The alternative was to recover them with a nice urethane coat to make them more durable.. that is until we discovered the strand bamboo varieties. Strand bamboo seems to be a one piece of material kind of plank but it's made by pressure compacting of bamboo and glues. The result? an amazingly hard surface! Much harder than any of the hardwoods we would have been able to afford.



Bamboo floors and supplies: approx. $3500/860 ft2

We will be floating these floors, gluing them to each other and allowing an empty space at the edges of the rooms for natural contraction and expansion.

The floors are sitting in our dining room and living room, but we'll be taking about 1/4 ton of floors upstairs to do a test run with the master bedroom. A great think about doing it yourself is that you can allow room for mistakes, considering the price of installers! Plus, at the end of the day (or week, or month.. or dare I say year) you'll know how to do it!

So flooring, underlayment and glue, together with craigslist-acquired table saw and miter saw just waiting for us to get to them... looking forward walking barefoot in our new floors!

No need to daydream...

So it's been a long time now and I've started remodeling my gorgeous house.

We bought a house in the quiet development of Independence at Mather. Very close to where the old military base was. It's a 1200+ home development that was built between 2000 and 2002. The house we purchased was built in 2002.

It's a functional 2222 square feet home with two floors. The first floor has an open room layout, which encompasses an entryway, diningroom, livingroom, craftroom and kitchen. Between the garage and the kitchen there is also an enclosed laundry room and pantry. Under the stairs there is a large closet. There are windows just about everywhere, it's such an incredibly lit house!

The kitchen is a large room surrounded by storage cabinets, a gas stove (oh I love to cook with gas!), a microwave above the stove, a dishwasher and a nice refrigerator.

The second floor has 3 standard size bedrooms (a guest room/exercise room, a craft room and a library den), a master bedroom with a bath and walk-in closet, a large (20x20) rec room which the girls converted into their huge bedroom :) and a bathroom. There is also a hall surrounding the staircase and a linen closet.

The backyard is amazing, there is a large concrete pad, perfect for bicycles, tricycles, running and playing. There is a functional spa immediately to the right when coming through the sliding glass doors. The backyard has a mature apricot tree, two orange trees, numerous cedar trees in the back, a pine, and two nondescript large trees. There are bushes all around, lining a large grass area. Amongst the bushes there are 4 delicious large rose bushes, a mature grapevine, two large mums and other decorative hedges.

The back patio also has an amazing amount of vegetable beds, some raised some not. There is a plastic shed that fits all our gardening supplies beautifully.

On a whim

Yes, I'm breaking the rule, I am starting to daydream about how to fix that property we just put an offer on. So this blog is to put some of my ideas down :)