Fence Post Progress

After the busy holiday long weekend, with family visiting and a lot of prep for the fence-- K got all of the remaining fence posts ready for the wooden fence!
Wednesday and Thursday were both really hot days, in the low 90s, but she worked right through it.  On Wednesday, I was able to help her set a few posts during the kiddo's nap, but she kept going after and did at least 20 more.  In addition to the posts her father got set over the weekend, we now have them all set up and ready for the boards.

Cement bags and poles waiting

Fences, Limestone, and Lithographs

It's been a fun 4th of July weekend, so far.  K's dad, sister, and our niece are visiting until Tuesday (the 4th.)  K's dad wanted to help us with our new fence, and today they got a ton of work done.

Over the past couple weeks, K and the guys who work for her have mapped out and mostly dug the post holes for our new fence.  But today K and her dad got like 10 posts actually measured and cemented in.  They did all the tricky ones, she said-- so after these, the rest will go in really quickly.

Bill, my father-in-law, was working really hard in the heat all day today.  For a long time this afternoon, he was digging on the side of the house where the fence will end at the path coming from our mudroom door.  I took a break from the kids and he showed me how he was running into a bunch of old stone and rebar about a foot under our "sidewalk."  The stone was chipping away, but of course he couldn't get past that rebar without a saw.

He showed me a cool rectangle stone that he dug up, and he had noticed that it had a really smooth top.  As I looked closer.... I noticed that it had writing on it.  I ran inside to grab a wet cloth, then wiped the dirt off it as carefully as I could.

There is careful etching in about 10 fonts on this stone... laying out the pattern for a Cashier's Check.
Unfortunately, through either the shovel chipping at it or just its original condition, there are chips missing in parts that could've probably provided some identifying information.  But, still.... what a cool find.

I had only a slight idea of what this was-- that it would've been used for printing.  But I would've expected the text to be reversed.  So that when it was printed the text on the paper would be correct.  I did a bit of searching online and quickly found that I was correct-- this is a lithographic stone, used for printing.  Some stones that I saw online had the text reversed and some had it the correct/forward way.

The stone is 8.5" long by 6.5" wide by almost 4" tall.  Pretty, white limestone, and lots of dirt on the sides.  Really cool....

K's dad unearthed more stones that were stacked up beneath our cement stairs and then the blacktop sidewalk leading to the alley.  Could these be more printing stones...?  He said they looked like stairs underneath our stairs.  We may not find out, though-- they got the post set and filled in the hole with cement.  I guess those stones will be left for another 50+ years for some future owner to discover....

Garage Shingles

A few days ago, K decided it would be a much better use of her time to hire a crew to shingle the roof of our garage.  She's so busy with work, and she figured it would take much longer for just her and her brother to finish the roof than it would take for a crew to just knock it out.  And it would cost about $1200 more, from the bids she was getting.

I agreed.  If it was actually going to save us money in the long run, AND save her a ton of headache and time-- it was completely a no-brainer.

I headed out in the morning to go to the farmers market, and then hung out for the day with my bestie and her kids, and by the time I got home...  they were done. Amazing.

Love it!

Happy Garden - Part 1

My raised-bed garden was finally discovered a couple weeks ago by the rabbits.  I'm pretty sure I know exactly who the culprit is, actually-- an adorable baby bunny that I've seen in our yard a lot lately.

One day, my radish plants were just GONE.  Like the seeds had never sprouted.  And the next day, a bunch of my carrot tops were whacked off.  And I've heard that bunnies like bell pepper plants, so while I'd been thinking that my pepper seeds never sprouted-- I bet they did sprout and the bunny just got them before I could see them!  Sassy bunnies.

So K helped me make a plywood wall around the garden, pretty late in the evening, a couple weeks ago.  It totally worked at keeping the bunnies out!  But it was also difficult for me to move around in there, and I had to climb over the wall to get in.  And for some reason, the bugs just LOVED being in there!  Maybe because the walls blocked the wind, it was just so buggy in there.  I got bit up every time I watered my garden or picked anything.

Temporary keep-out-rabbits garden fence

I wanted a trellis to run diagonally from my garden to the fence, for my cucumbers and zucchinis to climb up.  The zucchinis are so nuts now that it might be too late, but the cucumbers are just starting to reach out like crazy, so the timing is perfect.  K figured out how to make a fantastic trellis for me, and I helped.  While we were at it, we replaced the plywood walls with chicken wire over a new fence.  It was a lot of work, and we did it on a stupidly hot and humid day, so it was crazy.

Trellis frame

Trellis in place

I'll post some pictures soon of the finished fence.  We completed it pretty late, and we were both sweaty, ravenous, and bug-bitten.

Here's the latest view of the garage:

The next step is to finish the roof.  All the sheeting is up there, and most of the tar paper.  K needs to decide if she's going to have her usual roofing company do the job, or if she's going to do it herself.  Of course, it will be a lot cheaper for us to do it ourselves (and she's roofed a ton of things before, so this will be easy for her.)  But the time will be the deciding factor, I'm sure.  She's working on a big kitchen remodel right now, and finishing up a smaller one in the first couple days of this week.  And after those, she has a very elaborate addition project lined up.  So she's booked for quite a while.  Not sure when we'll be able to knock out the roof-- but once we do, there is a lot more that can be done with the roof in place.

Weekend Love

We made it all the way to July 5th without putting in our A/C window units!  (On the first floor, that is -- I've had one up in my office for a month or so.  It's much hotter up there!)  It's supposed to be really hot and humid tomorrow, so K wanted to get an A/C into the kitchen and into the bedroom.  We want to get a new central air unit, but we're taking things one thing at a time.  The garage comes first.


The first morning glory bloomed on our trellis the other day.  They're such a gorgeous purple, and I can't wait until they all start blooming!  Each plant is loaded with buds right now, so they should be going nuts very soon.

Did a little yard work this evening-- mowed the lawn, pulled weeds, trimmed a tree along the street, etc.  And I put mulch around the rose bushes in the front yard flower beds.  They look so much nicer-- I wish I'd thought of it sooner!  One of the rose bushes has been spreading and blooming like crazy, and the other bush isn't.  Hopefully it's just taking its time-- those suckers were not cheap!

We also got a bummer letter today from the City of Minneapolis.  Honestly, I've been a fan of the City offices ever since we bought the house.  They fixed a couple things in the alley when we asked, and they've been helpful every time we've called.  But today there was a letter telling us that we have less than 2 weeks to move our huge wood pile because it's a "nuisance."  The pile of wood is from that giant elm that we took down so that we could build the garage.  Our plan all along was to build a nice platform/rack right behind the garage, split all the logs, and stack them up so we'll have firewood for years to come.  But we've got to finish the garage first...  Otherwise we're just moving the wood twice, and that's nuts-- there is so much of it!

The thing that really sucks about this is that the only reason that wood pile is visible right now, is that the wooden fence is not up on one side of the yard-- and that's because a few of the posts were so rotten that they only stayed up for a year after we bought the house.  We've had an orange plastic snow fence tacked up since then, so our yard looks pretty trashy from that side.  You can see right in and can see our piles of materials and supplies-- pavers, siding, insulating blankets, windows, gutters etc.  It doesn't look pretty, I totally admit it, and I think it every time I view the yard from that angle.

And once the garage is finished, ALL of this will be fixed in a relatively short time, so this is really frustrating!  The windows have already been taken into the garage to be used in there.  When the siding on the garage is complete, it will be easier to organize all that wood right behind the garage and out of sight.  And with the work space set up, it will be easier to build a new fence, like we've been planning.  So...  I don't know.  Grrr.  We're trying, Minneapolis!!  We really are!

Peach Siding?

On Friday, when K was building our new flower beds in the front of the house, we had to re-pin down the drain pipe in that corner of the house.  The bracket that holds it on has been broken since before we got the house.  So, right now the drain pipe is held in place with a couple of mini bungee cords--  K's secret weapon for everything.

While crouching at the corner of the house, helping K, I noticed this peach/beige-colored shadow from behind where the pipe used to be/should be attached:

I pointed this out to K (who was busy and distracted), and she's like, "I don't know, looks like that's the color the house used to be?"

And looking back on those MLS photos, I realize that in the 1997 photo the house looks like this peachy-beige color.  And in the 1999 photo the house is clearly yellow. 

1997

 

1999

Rushed Re-Grading & Flower Beds

The weather was just gorgeous on Friday, so when I got home from work I found K working in our yard. 

One front corner of our house is where that water leaking happened before we moved in.  The ground kind of dips at that corner, and K has been meaning to re-grade the yard there.  Now that we have all that freshly churned up soil from the excavator in the back yard and a little bit left that we dug up from the garden area, we had dirt that we could use for this.

Re-graded dirt, and poly about to go in.

Dirt over the landscape fabric

She piled up dirt to fill the dip and made sure it was piled higher against the house and sloped down to the yard.  She put thick poly over that layer, then another layer of dirt, then landscaping fabric and a last few inches of dirt.  I will still be able to put plants in there, by sticking them through the landscaping fabric, and that will help keep the weeds down.  She also put water-proof caulk in the crack between our concrete slab and the foundation on the side of the house.  The concrete is sloped properly, but water was likely seeping in through that crack to the area next to the foundation and basement below.

The area in the front of the house had been just areas of dirt and some grass with really nothing else growing there, and the egress window well in the middle.  I had put a potted hibiscus in front of the gas meter, for a while, to hide it.  And since we never got the window basket put up, we left it on the ground, instead.  Basically, the area wasn't doing much to improve our curb appeal. 

To border our new flower beds, K used some pavers from the giant pile of them we have in our back yard.  She got these free shortly after we got our house, from a work project where they had to take out the pavers to install a deck. 

K and her string-lines....  ;-)

One down, one to go.

I think the difference is noticeable.  The area looks like it's been taken care of.  It will look better once I get some flowers in there.  I'm hoping to add some flowering shrubs this week.  Right now, I'm thinking red rose shrubs, but we'll see.

Beds are level with our house, even though the yard slopes down.

The flower bed on the right will be next -- we'll make this match the left side.

K was rushing to get this "little" project done yet that evening, because her dad and step-mom were coming to stay with us the next day.  I know the feeling-- you just want to do anything you can to make the house look better than the last time they were here, so that it looks like we're making progress!

Last step was to get some grass seed onto the patches of bare dirt around the new flower bed, and hopefully get that grass to take hold and keep that newly sloped dirt from washing away.  We have some grass seed leftover from filling in the patches from the bushes in the front, the kind of seed that is mixed with recycled newspaper.  It works great, stays in place.  The grass is a different type than what is originally in the yard, slightly darker, so if you look close you can kind of tell where we patched the lawn, but I think it still looks great.

There's still time for grass seed to grow this year!

I'm really excited to get some flowers in here!! 

Excavator Madness!

Yesterday afternoon, K sends me this text:

        " This happened today :) "

Yup, that is an excavator in our backyard, digging up the stump and roots left over from our tree removal.  I was beyond excited when I got that text!

There have been 2 things holding up any further progress on the garage--
#1:  Figuring out to do with that stump.
The tree stump absolutely had to be removed.  With the way the plans lay out in the back yard, the stump would lie half under the concrete slab of the garage, and half under the asphalt driveway, which will eventually lead to one or both of those surfaces cracking as the dead wood rots away.  It's possible to change the plans, sure, but neither of us wanted that, if we could get the stump out instead.
#2:  Getting the plans OK'ed by the city.  (I don't think she has brought the plans in, yet, so this still remains.)

K asked the excavating subcontractor that they use at her job if, since the job site they're working at is 5 miles from our house, he would come over and see if this was something he could do.  She said he was working on it for about an hour, but got the entire stump and most of the root system up and out of the ground, evened out all the dirt in the area, and then used his shovel to pack down the loosened dirt into the hole left by the stump.  Amazing!!

Here are some pictures and video of the process:

And the result:

Look at how tall these roots are!

Hanging Bar For My "Closet"

K and I both have the smaller single door-sized closets in our bedroom, but we both keep the bulk of our clothes in our offices, and just keep the off-season or dress-up stuff in the bedroom.  My work clothes & everyday clothes are up in my office.  This is nice because we are sometimes getting ready for work at different times, so we don't have to wake the other up.  And our bedroom doesn't have a dresser in it!  It can be uncluttered by our clothing messes, and just contains our bed and two nightstands.

So for the purpose of holding my clothes in my office, I purchased a rolling clothes-hanging thing from Target for 20 or 30 bucks.  Mostly plastic, and after a few months the thing developed a definite lean...  It occasionally falls over, basically.  We had to flip it around and lean it toward the corner of the room so it would lean into the wall, and not fall over when I wasn't even near it. 

Leaning line of clothes...

I've been asking K to put in a permanent hanging bar for me, ever since this thing started tipping over.  But it's tricky, because of the sloped walls in my office.  There isn't a normal bracket for putting up a closet rod that works on a sloped wall.  I did find something online for this purpose, but it was spendy.

While at the Depot yesterday, we grabbed the normal brackets and rod, and K figured she could put triangle-shaped blocks behind the brackets to put them in the right position.  But then something made her think of galvanized pipes!  So we went to that aisle and had fun figuring out how we could use a galvanized pipe and pipe fittings to make a hanging rod.

One 3/4"x 4-foot pipe + 2 flanges + 1 45-degree elbow = the perfect piece to attach to the sloped ceiling and the normal wall at the end of the room.

K attached the flanges to the studs and tested the bar by hanging on it a bit.  It stayed secure!  Should be able to hold lots of clothes.

So, this works great!  I have more room for hangers than I had before.  And the bar certainly isn't going anywhere.

Space on the left could be used for shoes!

It does stick out more into the room than my portable bar did, but we had to put the bar where the wall studs were, and not just wherever it looked good.  The space behind the clothes seemed like it would be wasted, at first, but I realized that I could set up some nice shoe racks back there.  Or maybe shoe cubbies, and then I could put hats and boxes of accessories on top of those. 

Garden Plot - Day 1

Today we started one more thing on our To Do list...  Now that the tree is trimmed, there is a lot more sunlight in the yard.  And sunny space for my garden!  I know I'm getting a very late start on it, but that's how it goes.  Snow all through April, rain all through May, and lots of other things with higher priority through June.

We got a great start on our raised bed today.   It was very hot out, but we went to the Depot and got everything we needed, backed up the truck onto the lawn and heaved the supplies and all the bags of soil over the fence.  (Got covered in muck from wet compost/manure bags... Don't even want to know.)  We picked a spot that now gets great sunlight, and isn't too filled in with weeds yet.

 K planning our layout

Me, happily, sweatily upturning all the weeds in the square

We got pretty far today before we had plans for the evening.  K built the box, and got the stakes buried in the ground.  As with everything, we hit a couple small snags-- one being some really large rocks under the dirt, pretty much right where our stakes needed to go.  Had to shift the box over just a bit.  Annoying, but fixable.

The beginnings of the box

The box -- almost there!

The next steps are wire mesh to keep out underground critters, landscaping fabric to keep out the weeds, and then filling the box with all the top soil and compost that we bought.  And then get some plants in here!  I have a few seedlings that were doing great, and are now struggling in their tiny containers.  And a mint plant and a basil plant that I bought at Trader Joe's.  But other than that, I will probably be making a trip to a local nursery to get some plants that are where they should be by the 2nd week in July.  Excited!

Pulling Numbers and Stringing Lines

Been a while since my last post, because we have been BUSY!  Lots going on these past couple weekends, including a wedding, and PRIDE in Minneapolis!  Busy, fun, tiring.  Lots of good people and good memories.  Since July 4th fell on a Thursday this year, we both took a long weekend and are hoping to get some things done around the house.

#1 is the garage.  The dang garage!  We need to get going on this!

Today, K and I "pulled numbers."  It was... an all-day process.  First, K needed to finish taking out the chain link fence that ran around where our big elm used to be.

The problem with this section of fence was all the bushes and little trees that had grown through the links throughout the years.
Check this one out!  --------->
Ouch, looks like that hurts!
































So K had to clip the ends of a bunch of the links by hand-- links that were too buried in the ground or too entwined with branches.  Then she used her towline and her truck to pull the sections of links free.  Some of the fence will be reusable, but some parts are too bent or already damaged.  We plan to run another chain-link fence along the back property line, once the garage is built.

Since she had found the property markers and run string lines to connect them, a couple months ago, we just needed to set up the strings again to get started.

And then it got more complicated-- measuring angles and lengths and trying to get everything to match the plans K had drawn up on Google Sketch-Up.  But, she is good!  Just a couple adjustments to the plans and lots of measuring, and we had our garage drawn out in our yard in neon yellow string.

My job was to hold the ends of the measuring tapes, while K walked along the string and measured. 

My job had me standing at the corner of our lot quite a bit, which was nice.  Not often that I need to stand at the very end of our alley, ducking under trees.  But the view from there is our whole yard!  Pretty nice view, and it will be even better someday.

 

And here is our garage plan, in yellow string.  The string's really thin, so hopefully you can see it.  It's going to be a really nice-sized garage! 

It's at an angle that follows our property line, in the back, and that will allow K to pull her work trucks into the garage really easily from the alley.  No sharp turns.  And since it's off to the side and close to the alley, it means we get the whole rest of the yard to use for everything else.

 

Dear Scrappers....

The items in our backyard are OFF LIMITS!!  WTH?! 

Someone stole our awnings out of our back yard today, the ones we took down a couple weeks ago.
Seriously, the back yard.  Not off to the side, not anywhere obvious.  Literally, flattened and tucked in alongside other items just a foot or two from the back of our house.

Seriously?  Someone would have had to looked at the house, said, "Hey, there's only a few awnings on that house, maybe the other ones are still around somewhere."  And then gone poking through our yard to find them!

I called around to all the local scrap-yards I could find online.  I emailed pictures of the awnings to every email I could find.  We're annoyed and want them to get caught.

It's not the money that bothers us...  They probably weren't worth more than $50.  It just feels like a violation.  Someone was in our yard, close to our house, and stole something.
And what's to stop them from doing it again?

Awnings Are Coming Down!

Ever since the first time we saw our house, K has been saying, "Those awnings gotta go."

I didn't care either way, really.  The awnings were fine, doing their job keeping the rain off our heads as we go in the door.  The window awnings did block the view more than I liked, though.  And I know awnings are supposed to be helpful with shading the house, but our house faces South, so the couple side windows are really the only ones that get intense light.
I agreed with K that the house would look drastically different without them, and I told her she should take them off if that's what she wanted.

I can't believe they lasted a whole month, truthfully.

Work in progress...  My handy-lady on her ladder.

Determined...

And the result...?  Our house is awake!

Not all of the awnings are off, yet.  We took off the 3 from the front of the house, and 3 from the first-floor side windows.  We left the ones on the 2nd floor, for now, because those will take a little more effort to get down.  And we left the big awning over the side door, since that's the door we always use, and it's nice to have for the rain, and eventually for the snow.  We'll take that down when we can replace it with something else right away.

We like it!  K was right, it does look nicer.  Plain, but still nicer.  And we'll make it look better soon.