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!

Second House Anniversary

It's a gorgeous day in Minneapolis and we bought our house 2 years ago today! 

And unlike last year, I didn't procrastinate on getting an anniversary photo, so we actually have one this year...

2014

And again, back to the morning we bought the house...

2012

Lots of things left to do, of course...  But we have done quite a bit already!
Things we've done in the last couple years:

• Removed the front awnings
• Added edging around our sidewalk and along the front of the yard
• Removed the 4 giant bushes from the front and side yards
• Added flower beds on either side of the front window -- and I just put some rose bushes in there this week!  Finally!
• Took down 2 sick elm trees and trimmed up all the other trees
• Poured the concrete slab for the garage
• Added a patio door to the back of the house
• Replaced the front porch light
• Built my little garden plot in the backyard
• Fixed the drywall, painted and added flooring to the basement office
• Painted and added flooring in the main basement room
• Cleaned out, painted and added shelving to the storage room in the basement
• Replaced the washer & dryer and painted the laundry room
• Painted the ceiling in my office and added my "closet" hanging bar
• Scraped the popcorn from the living room ceiling
• Installed the refinished vintage chandelier to our bedroom

Exciting plans in the works for this month, too--  K has ordered her garage supplies and will be starting the garage in the next couple weeks.  When we realized yesterday that it's now been two years since we got the house, she said, "I can't believe I've been living without a garage for two years!"  And that's true!  Because she did have garages at our last couple rentals, but not at the home that we've actually owned.  Like I've said before, it will be a HUGE help to have the garage built and functional. 

My little garden is coming along nicely.  Started everything from seeds this year, so all the plants are a little small right now, but they look great...

Yummy lettuce and spinach

I also got an amazing present a few days ago from my bestie-- she made me an herb pot with all sorts of yummy things in it!  Basil, mint, lime thyme, parsley, oregano and sage...  YUM!  I have a couple of these growing in my garden, too, but the ones in the pot are fully grown and ready to be eaten...

Beautiful herb pot gift!

She also gave me a couple big clumps of chives from her garden.  She's had them growing in her garden for a few years and they've spread out a lot, so she had plenty to spare.  They smell amazing and they're so gorgeous!  I planted them in a big galvanized utility sink that I already had. I've had it for so long that I really don't remember where I got it!

Pretty chives...

Sicky Elm Tree - Update

So, our lovely treehouse elm has been taken down.  We cut it down on Friday evening, and today we dealt with the branches and logs.

There are no pictures, I didn't bother.  It wasn't fun and it wasn't exciting.
It was just sad.

Sicky Elm Tree

Oh, I'm so sad!  Came home today to find this note in our mailbox:

Our treehouse elm has Dutch Elm Disease and needs to be cut down.  Soon.
We had noticed recently that it looked wilted and a couple small branches had died off.  And what we just learned about Dutch Elm is that by the time the tree starts looking sick, it's pretty much too late to save it.

And here's the bright orange paint to go along with the letter...

 






















The first time we saw the house, even though there were a dozen trees around this house, we both looked at this elm and thought it would be the best place for a tree house for our kids someday.

It's a beautiful tree.  Verrry big.  The branches extend over the sidewalk and part of the street on the side of our property.  I think this part looks so pretty.

We want to replace the fence some day, and had planned to move it to the other side of the tree, to get this tree more "in" our yard. 
The view from the back yard...

Elm canopy meeting up with the backyard ash, far overhead...

*sigh*.....

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!! 

Trimming the Ash in the Backyard

Once K and I were moved into our house for a bit, we thought we'd have to cut down 2 massive trees in our yard-- the elm directly behind our house and the ash off to the side of the house.  But after cutting down the elm, our tree-trimming-master neighbor suggested that we just trim up the ash in order to get more sunlight in the yard.  Like, drastically trim it. 

We thought it was worth a try.  Worst case, we could always take down the whole tree later if we hated it.  But I really doubt we'll be doing that now-- the tree looks great!  And there is SOO much sunlight in our yard!!  We can actually have grass now, and a garden--  not just dirt!

 

Our backyard before:
Gloomy, always dark, damp, buggy.  Grass only growing in the patches where the sun could reach.

And the trimming process... 

What remains:

Tall and beautiful elm, with a wide and lush canopy-- just up much higher now to allow in lots of gorgeous sunlight!
(We did take care of trimming off all the stubs-- I just took this picture before that.)

And now...  All this glorious sunlight in our backyard!  It was so lovely to see the sun hitting each new patch of ground as each branch came off.  And the tree will still provide a bit of shade when we want it.  The best of both worlds.

 

Lackluster Lilacs

Since this was our first Spring in the house, this was the first time we got to experience the lilacs blooming in our backyard!  And it was...  disappointing.  For the amount of space taken over by these huge lilac bushes, there were very few actually flowers.  And almost all of those were up 9 feet!!   There was one bunch that I could actually reach last week, so I had one little vase of them in the house for a few days.  And that's all.  :-(

At some point, the lilacs were 6 or 8 distinct bushes.  Now, they are an overgrown sort of wall.  Grown in between to mesh with each other, grown deep, and very, very tall.

K was talking about hacking them down so that they weren't taking over the yard so much, and that sounded horrible to me!  But then I did some reading to see what we'll need to do to get them to flower more, and that's pretty much what we need to do.  We'd need to basically cut them in half, height-wise.  And trim a lot of the extra shoots and the old, dead growth.

It sounds like we probably won't have any flowers the next year, after we do this.  But that the year after, they should do nuts!  And I'll actually be able to reach the flowers without a very tall ladder.  Sounds like a sacrifice I'd be willing to make.

What A Difference A Week Makes!

Last Friday, we has just gotten like 7 or 8 inches of snow, and I took all those "Winter Wonderland" pictures that were in my last post.

Today, it was 78 degrees!  We completely skipped Spring, and went straight from Winter to Summer in one week.  When I got home from work today, K was already in the front yard for our first day of yard work this year. 

When we bought the house, the front yard had 3 enormous over-grown bushes, 2 smaller over-grown bushes, and 2 badly-cared-for trees in it.  And there's another one of the enormous bushes in the side yard, and a long row of lilac bushes in the back yard that really need some care.

Basically, every plant in the entire yard has been neglected for about a dozen years!

Last year, Kristy immediately ripped out the smaller bushes near our front door, and the giant bush near the door.  We planted some grass seed over the giant dirt patch that remained, and as of now, it's almost all filled in and not very noticeable.

June 2012

July 2012

So today we got to work taking out the remaining 2 giant bushes, and starting to trim around the trees in the front yard. 

June 2012

April 2013...  brown.

The bushes are fairly easy-- just a bit tedious.  You have to reach under and cut each branch.  And then tackle the root ball and get that out of the ground.

K went at the roots with like a pick-axe (I forgot what she called it).  Very impressive!  It helped to knock off as much dirt as possible to help make the big gob a little lighter as she/we lifted it out of the ground and into the wheel barrow.

The gnarled tree that has my heart!

 














Meanwhile, I worked on trimming around this wonderful, craggly-looking tree.  Honestly, just looking at it, it was difficult to tell if the thing was even alive, since it seems to still be hibernating  (not that I'm surprised, with the weather we've been having).  But I looked back in photos from last year and saw that it was leafy and full last year, with deep burgundy leaves.  Really pretty.

The problem with this little tree, obviously, is how many new shoots it's been growing out of the ground.  I trimmed as much as I could, and then K came back to hack at it more below the ground.  And we're not done yet...  It's a big job.

We're hoping, if it survives our surgery, that it will put its energy and nutrients into the branches above and that it will stay healthy longer.  We're also removing the paving stones around the bottom of it.

Just like razor-wire...

And then there's a tree, kind of a double tree, right at the corner of our lot.  We definitely want this to stay here, since it separates our yard from the sidewalks, and helps define our yard.
This poor thing...  The tree seems to be doing okay-- it just has one rogue new trunk growing, and a handful of unnecessary branches.  But at the bottom, it is COVERED in 10 years of dead leaves and litter, and what can only be described as the MOST EVIL THORN BUSH I have ever seen!

No kidding, this is the stuff that grew around Sleeping Beauty's castle and kept all the knights away for 100 years!  It stabbed me through my gloves over and over.  I was being so careful with it, and kept imagining what the people driving by were thinking.  "Aw, look at the girl being all dainty with her yardwork and not wanting to get dirty."  That wasn't it!  I didn't want to get stabbed!!

Thorns!!

Well, we'll probably head back out tomorrow and keep going.  We successfully got those 2 large bushes out of there, and now just have big dirt spots.  Time for grass seed! 

I'm thinking I should really go get a window box and some potted flowers to put out front, too.  Quickest thing I can do to make the house look cared for.  It will take a while to fill in these dirt spots and do some of the bigger projects.  But anything we can do to make it look brighter and happier will help our curb appeal.  And we definitely need that!

We've also realized how BIG our front yard actually is!  Now that the bushes aren't taking up half the space, we can see how much space we really have!

MLS Photos

Since I've been wanting to research our home's history, I asked our realtor if he could find any additional information about its previous sales or owners.
He sent me all the listings for the house on the MLS system.  There were a total of 5 listings, including the one that was included in our house search this past spring. 
And there were 2 pictures of the house that I had never seen before.  One from 2003, with the house clean, the yard maintained, and the roof unstained.

2003 Sale Listing

And the other was from 1997.  The roof looks similar to how it does now, a bit rust-stained, so it must've been replaced between 1997 and 2003.  But the landscaping is adorable!  Lush green grass, bright rose bushes, white stone edging and lights along the path to the door.  Now I know why we found so many rocks buried under the layers of dead grass in the front yard!

1997 Sale Listing

It's inspiring to see this little house all dressed up with a fancy yard.  That's our hope for the yard next year, to brighten it up and give it a lot more curb appeal.  We were so overwhelmed with the moving this summer, and then it was so hot, that all we could manage was ripping out one of the giant, overgrown bushes, and putting two potted hibiscus next to the front door!

I wonder if it would be annoying to do that rock border again...