Paint-tastic

So wonderful news, we're getting a New Years Gift from our contractor! He's painting our house, completely, instead of just priming it like he's required to. So no more pink house! He told us this last Thursday when he came by in the evening and they started painting on Friday. We had already been thinking about the colors we wanted and had grabbed some paint samples from Home Depot probably over a month ago so we gave those to him since he wanted to use a tinted primer. Fine with us, though we did make sure to tell him that we don't know the final color yet. Good thing too cause the colors we pick out were UGH Ugly! Take a look:


Easter candy blue, don't you think? Quite a shock to come home to. Apparently, choosing lighter colors than you would guess you like is something you do for inside paint colors, NOT outside. So over the weekend we went back and forth to Home Depot two times before we had all the paint colors you can see on the front of the porch. But I wasn't really satisfied yet, so I went back one more time Sunday afternoon and pick out three more (total 12 samples = about $48, I think worth it for an exterior color choice) and applied them to the other side of the porch.


Love, finally I'd found the right shade and saturation. I was crazy for both of these colors so spent a ton of time making large swatches to compare. And then, I just couldn't decide. I made Patrick, who was getting quite tired of the process and seemed a bit convinced that I was trying to get the house painted teal, go outside and look at the colors twice before he finally convincingly said that he would like either one of them. So.... I decided as I was going to sleep that the brighter blue that I do very much love might not be acceptable to enough people, or me after it was on the entire house so the one of the left it is.

While I write this now, the men have probably finished spraying the correct color on the house and should be painting the rails and trim the whitish color we chose. Also, today, the men should be taking down the ugly metal awning over the front window. Seen here along with one other dramatic front yard change:


Do you see it in the shadows? No?


No more Port-a-Pottie!! That wonderful surprise greeted us about a week ago. Also, quite a few other things have been completed in the last few weeks. The regrading, new drainage, and concrete around the chimney is finished. It started out like this:


This picture was clearly taken on a dryer week and the problem isn't so obvious but just out of the picture is our chimney - our water trap. One morning after a rain, we took a look at this area and saw puddled sludge, because the water was just collecting there, trapped two inches below the concrete drive, and over the past century slowly making the chimney sink along with the rest of the living room. But now the foundations are a bit taller and the downspouts lead into a buried pipe diverting all the water down past the chimney. And to block any other water from pooling there anymore, we have new sloped concrete over this area.


It doesn't look obvious from the picture but the new concrete is nicely sloped and water won't be collecting there anymore.

Now walking up the drive in to the backyard, we finally have a back porch again!


...it isn't quite what I was expecting... but this is my fault for not drawing up plans for what I wanted. I was pretty much thinking that a small back porch is a small back porch, there's nothing really to explain. Well except the landing, I wanted that to be brick so I did talk with Abel about that and the men built it to the pattern I wanted using the extra bricks that we'd found around the yard. I'm happy enough with that. We'll have two planting beds on either side of the landing so the rough concrete underneath won't be visible. Now the siding however... Don't know why they put that on there. But then I didn't specify that I expected the lower part of the porch to just be open. I thought that later I might add lattice to it the open porch but of all the problems that have come up due to bad communication, this is one of the smallest so I didn't complain. All the side pieces of the porch are just screwed on so we'll just take off the siding sometime on our own.

So anyway, next, to the lemon tree at the back of the garage.


And yes, I know it looks like I just weeded a spot next to the tree but I actually finally planted some of my suffocating bulbs. This patch has about 50 little muscari all over and 5 lily of the valley towards the right side. Then I took my ailing chamomile from the tiny pots I should have removed them from months ago and put them on top for a pretty, mossy cover growth (eventually). Also, good to note is that the muddy pit just visible below isn't full of pooling water anymore, after the week of dry weather, all the standing water has finally drained away and even better, despite all the water clearly flowing down the trenches to the bottom of the yard, the bottom area was dry after only 2 days (not so for the top half of the yard, we still need to do a little digging but we can only do so much on our weekends).

Our last bit of progress is in the back corner of the yard. Here's what the blackberry patch looked like in spring before we had the house, before we'd even been able to cut down the weeds.


You can just see a red spot from a rose buried inside it and an orange spot from a nasturtium. Well, we took down the pear tree the first weekend we had the place because it honestly had no roots and was obviously dieing. But it took until the weekend before last for us, that is to say me, to cut through the rest of the thicket. It took two weekends but now it's almost gone.


Sorry for the bad lighting but then the picture wouldn't be very pretty even in the best lighting. The lump towards the left side is apparently a bush that the blackberries engulfed and I assume, killed from keeping light off it for two or more years. Next to that is the pretty rose that had been throwing up reddish purple flowers during the summer and that now had bright orange hips, looking very healthy despite the brambles. Then, there are the three volunteer trees that I'll just have to get to later... when I've gotten over this cold.

Even More Water

As forecasted, Oakland received just over two inches of rain during the night. Did our newly dug trench survive the night, did it move the excess water away from the boggy top of the yard? Yes! And it still is!


Looking just at the sky, one would think that the rain has stopped already but our property doesn't seem to understand that. There is so much runoff from the hill behind us that we have a proper creek of water running down our trenches. And it's so sweet! I was a bit mesmerized looking at the tiny babbling brook this morning, watching the light bounce off it as it swirled about to the end of the system where it then made it's own eddy across the flat mud where our patio used to be and curled toward the back gate at the side of the house, like it actually wanted to join the french drain buried just below.

So these pictures show the rest of the system that I was too tired or lazy or muddy to take pictures of when we finished it on Sunday. After the trench drops down to the lower level of the yard, it goes down a bit and then we decided for a bit of whimsy, it splits in two and we have a little island. We will probably make a cute little bridge to go over it or maybe two. We will need to work a little bit on the leveling though so that the water flows more easily into the inner branch, right now the only water in there is the back up from the end of the trench. Also, can you see the silt (or debris left in the trench from our digging) that has traveled all the way down the yard to try and clog the lower branch.



In the second picture, you can see the water edging ever higher in the trench till it overflows at the end flooding this new area of the yard! But this is what we were aiming for. Even without the rest of the trench dug out the water is continuing to flow down and is leaving the yard in the french drain put in by our contractor.

Far too Much Water

So this weekend, I was finally set to stop procrastinating and fill our green bin with blackberry brambles. And I did, as much as could fit at least, which happened to be a bit less than half. In the process of pulling and separating the amazingly long canes (some twisting nearly a dozen feet), I found some oddly high tangles of grass, right in the middle of the brambles, surrounding flat depressions of grass... kind of like a bed... It was empty when I found it but this must have been a nest for something big - maybe raccoons or opossums?



Recently, we've found some rinded lemons sitting around the yard, like rodents have eaten the sweet skin and left the sour flesh - my coworker rents a place with garden full of rats that do a similar thing.... but luckily she said that they always leave a mess of lemon peel bits around the part they leave behind and my thieves are very clean, taking every piece with them so I'm crossing my fingers that it's just squirrels or raccoons. Anyway, I don't think they've been living in our blackberry stand for a while now or at least hopefully they won't be coming back now that I've open their nest up to the cold.

So while I packed our bin with the thorny thorny canes, trying to not get pricked, I glanced over to our back planting bed and noticed (for the second or third time) that standing water had collected in the left side of the triangle. I wasn't happy the other times I'd noticed this but didn't have the time to deal with it, this time I decided that now that the bin was full, I should try to fix that problem, too. Here's the first picture I took, sadly after I'd taken a couple spadefuls out but the problem is still obvious:


A few minutes shoveling didn't take care of the problem so I kept going, discovering more and more water just barely under the boggy ground I was standing on. At the least, you can see below that the standing water has moved away from the roses, pelargoniums, and lavender that were probably drowning a bit.


Now the other side didn't look bogged down but if I was making a drainage ditch for the one side I wanted it to do it's work on the other side as well. Also, I noticed that much more water came out and gathered in the areas I had dug already than one would think possible so I figured something would appear even in the dry looking side. And it did, but there's no good pictures to show off the digging I did for the rest of the night, well past sunset (I haven't been that enthusiastic digging ever, I think). And eager to get started on Sunday, I came out to take a picture of any continued flooding the next morning.





And yes, I did all this awesome trenching with my own girlishly weak arms. And all the horrible mucky, muddy mess, that's mine too. It was also all over me the night before and destroying the only pair of shoes I really wear, some little black flats, that I'm now wearing, even though they're still a bit caked. Feeling that after the night before, flats with no tread and very little waterproofing power weren't the best footwear to continue in, I went with Patrick and we both got some wellies (or galoshes if you prefer) to work in.

This time, I dragged in Patrick to lend his more powerful, less sore muscles to the trenching. Together we were able to get the trench continued all the way to the end of the grass in the lower part of the back garden. Very proud of our weekend work, although it is true that I'd hoped that I'd finally get the rest of my bulbs buried and my maybe some of my new plants - Christmas Eve nursery trip, my present! - in the ground.

Still, this means we're finally started and even halfway done on one of our many projects. Now that the trench is dug out, we just have to get gravel and rocks delivered so we can make our dry creek bed. In my original plans I didn't have the creek going up into the top garden but I think it will be better this way. Now our large decomposed granite flat space up top will be bisected by a cute little creek and we can place flat flagstones for steps across it. Also, any worry about bogginess in patio area up top will be taken care of.

But anyway, one to two inches of rain is forecasted for tonight so I'll take more pictures tomorrow that include the second part of the trench and we'll see if it survives the night and serves its purpose.

Boring Little Things

Over the last couple weeks, progress has slowly been made. The garage is still electric doorless since the door is a bit rich for our blood, at least until about new year, but there is now a side access door and Abel's part of the job is finished (except for them emptying it of their tools etc).


The french drain is working well, now with it's entire tubing buried and a let-out at the front of our property. Also, I noticed the other day that the drain pipe from the garage is properly connected to it now and so is the drain pipe on the side of the porch. The back porch is in progress now, the men poured the concrete supports about two weeks ago and built the frame about a week later.


Also, you can see a bit from the picture above, but the guys have also been scraping and sanding our house all the way around over the past two weeks. You can see it more dramatically in these two pictures:



And you can also see that our window bars are off! I love the way it looks without them, so much brighter and friendlier. But Patrick insists that we'll have to have them put them back up after the painting because our windows are old easy-shatter ones. But they'll be off again some day once we get the windows updated. Also, on the lower picture, that large dirt plot next to the house isn't there just because the men cleaned up, they cut out a couple feet of concrete so they can repair and regrade. Before the foundation was practically at the same height as the small strip of dirt that was there before.


Now, I was surprised to see the concrete gone in the first place, but not only were they preparing to repair the rotten sills and the grading issue, but I found yesterday that they had actually poured additional concrete on the lowest parts of the foundation on that side.



After that, there are a few more things, but I'll post about them in a few days when I have pictures. In the meantime, so that I have a couple of pictures that aren't so brown and dull, here is how the front garden is doing.


The plants are filling in nicely, it's been a bit more than a month and a half since I planted all these and they're not quite double in size yet but then everything has been slowing down now that it's getting colder.


And in the larger beds, the seedlings are doing even better, only the Lantana is looking a bit scrawny, I think it's waiting for high heat again to burst into growth. I also finally got some of my larger plants in the ground, the Penstemon in the front and Coleonema 'Breathe of Heaven' in the back.

Oh and just for fun - I caught my older grumpy cat being nice to one of our new kittens hehe.

Confused...

Now, yesterday, we came home to find that nothing had happened around the house, but two days ago we came home to find three things entirely unexpected. I haven't been able to talk to Abel yet about it, but as these are extras being done to the place and not negatives, I guess I'm okay... Just don't know what's going on.


1) Gutters - I already knew that we were getting one free gutter on the side of our garage that hangs over our neighbor's yard (because she has been nagging my contractor nonstop). However, I was not aware that I would be getting another one along the other side... And it's not like I can afford to pay for one or that Abel doesn't already know this so... Free gutters! Yay.


2) Drain Pipe - Not the one coming out of the ground there, that's the unfinished end of our french drain which we were fully expecting and paying for. No, the white drain pipe curling its way around our porch. Now, Abel did say he'd give us one new drainpipe... but not here.


Here, where the old one is still attached. He said he'd gift us this even though we don't have the money for full gutters right now, because this one drains water right into our chimney base, probably creating the conditions that made the chimney and front room sink 4 inches in the last hundred years. So... Perhaps there was a bit of miscommunication between Abel and his gutter people.

3) Paint Scraping - Apparently, we paid for a good powerwashing of the exterior to remove the peeling paint. I'm not aware of paying for it but I don't think I'll complain, we were going to do it anyway when we painted the house ourselves next year.


A little annoyed about all the lead paint chips on our soil... but I guess I'll just have to make sure they clean up.

New Foundations, Lil' Front Garden

So pulling into our driveway on the first, we found that the carcass of our garage had been carried away during the workday (well, most of it, some being around the backyard).

And we now understood the sign we saw hooked onto our back door the day before.

We quickly decided to take their advice and have been using the front porch for the last week. Then, in the past week, the crappy old foundations for the garage were beefed up. One side was knocked down and wholesale replaced. The other two foundation walls were built up half a foot or so and all of them now have rebar to strengthen the bond.

Last in the backyard, the men have also started on the french drain.

Then, starting last weekend, being blocked from easy access to my backyard maintenance, I decided to finally start digging up the front yard. Last Sunday:

Just about the very first thing I did once the house was officially ours was clean up the grass and weeds in the front sidewalks and growing in the little hole for the street tree. But until last week I hadn't done anything except try to deeply water it once a week or so (we still don't have a front hose bib so I've had to drag the back hose around or use a bucket). But last week I finally got out there and saved the tree from it's ugly weedyness. I've put in all plants that I started from seed at the end of July, not even 2 months ago.

My pretty little lambs ears. They should spread out over the whole area eventually.

Then, Chamomile. It seems a bit of a sensitive plant, don't know if it will do well in the low water street planting but they've been bursting from their little 3" pots. And I love the way they smell! And Patrick will like the little white daisies.

The last bit of the planting, they're hard to see but there are two tiny little blue fescue clumps on this side. I think I'll move the one that's farther back over the the chamomile side soon - that's probably not enough room for two clumps of grass. There are also a bunch of Gazania but I've decided since they bloomed about two weeks ago, that I don't really like them. They were listed as an annual though so I put them in anyway as by next year the lambs ears will have taken them over.

Anyway, this weekend we started digging up the front "lawn." You've seen it before in pictures like this.

Now we have this!

It looks teeny and insignificant BUT we spent hours and hours getting all the grass out of those two beds and out from under the concrete. We had to pick out all the roots you see below until the place was clean. It certainly wasn't quick, but I don't want to get this horrible grass growing up through our mulch and into my lil' baby plants.

But isn't it pretty for all of it.

It's mostly symmetrical, for this part. After the rocks, each side will be different.

See our new pretty little Cuphea and Yellow Lantana.

My Catmint from Seed.

More Blue Fescue. Just another two or so small pots of it that still need to find ground.

And Lavender Lady. It's supposed to bloom 3 months from seed but I guess in a month it will be too cold for it to flower, so next year.

Sadly, that's all we had time to get done this weekend but at least the change is quite dramatic. We have more than half a dozen more plants we wanted to get to but they will have to wait til next week I guess.