Wood Pile Party

We got our woodpile taken care of-- finally!  The only thing remaining is the main part of the root system.

On Friday, G came over and helped us build the platform for the wood pile.  We reused all the wood in the platform-- palettes and a big stack of pressure-treated wood salvaged from an old patio.  All free, and all saved from the landfill.

G!  What a pro!

Salvaged wood

On Saturday, we had our Wood Pile Emergency party.  We had put out an S.O.S. to our friends, asking for a hand in splitting and stacking all of the wood.  And they totally came through!  We had a bunch of friends sorting through the pile, running the wood-splitter, making a million trips with the wheelbarrows, and stacking wood for hours.

We paid them for their services with beer, pizza, heartfelt thank-yous, and a life-time supply of firewood.

Supplies for the party!

We rented a wood-splitter for the day, and it helped a lot.  We were able to split up the large logs into manageable pieces.  And it was really fun.  A couple of our buddies wanted to try their hand at the splitter, too, and they had a blast.

K used her chainsaw quite a bit, too-- which she was not sad about!  Lots of long branches to chop up.

We worked ALL day on Saturday.  I hurt my hand from the repetitive motions, which was not helpful when I was at my photography gig that night! 

Then K and I kept at it on Sunday, but had a lot less to do.  She was determined to get it all done by the time she needed to return the wood-splitter, and she totally did it.  We also realized that the wood-splitter can go vertically, too.  I don't know if that really made it easier, though...  When it's horizontal you need to hoist the logs up onto the platform.  And when it's vertical, you don't have to lift the logs as high, but you need to bend down each time to place them.    Whatever...  It was a lot of work either way.

 

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!

Garage Framing - Day 6

A couple things were done on the garage today -- K was at a job for part of the day and I was at a meeting, so K's brother kept on with the process.  He added braces to the bottoms of the trusses and kept going with the sheeting on the walls.

Bracing on the trusses

Sheeting on most of the walls

I think they have another job to get to tomorrow, so it may be a couple days before they're back on the garage.  But I think there are just a few things they need to do before we'll get the inspection on the framing.  Yay, progress!!

Garage Framing - Day 4 & 5 - Sheeting and Trusses

The garage is coming along!  It's really exciting to see it taking shape.

On Monday, K and I worked on the garage, and we put up the sheeting on one side of the garage.  I helped her put it in place and then nail it to the studs.  We quit when it started raining, so I didn't get any photos-- the rain continued through the night!

Tuesday was a big day.  The trusses were delivered.  I was about to head out the door, when I heard the "BEEP BEEP"-ing outside and realized I couldn't get out of our alley with my car, because the trusses were being delivered at that moment.

The transformer truck backing in with the trusses

When I got back in the early afternoon, K and her brother had the first couple trusses in place and wanted me to help.  So I did-- I walked along the walls, on top of the sheeting that I had helped install and helped place the trusses where they needed to go.  It was a bit nerve-wracking at first, that's for sure...  But I got used to the height and moving around.  The slight problem for all of us was that it was very hot and humid, and you tend to get a little dizzy when you're overheated.  No one fell, though, so we're all good!  And we were able to finish before it started raining.  Again.  (My garden is LOVING this rain every day!)

K inside the web of bracing

Bracing boards

My monkey on the trusses!

The view from above

Monkey on the wall!

Swinging her hammer, doing her thing...!

Nearing the end!

Finished for the day

We were a sweaty, sun-burned bunch when we were done...  But we got so much done that it was definitely worth it!  I think my muscles will be sore in the morning, too....  

Garage Framing - Day 2 & 3

Progress has continued for the past two days on the construction of the garage.  Actually, it's still going on outside right at this very moment.  Ahh, the sound of nail guns... 

It's really starting to look like a building!  When I got home from class today, all the walls were up, and then K and her brother put in the header above the garage door.

Lifting up the header

Header is completely level!

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...

Happy Concrete Slab Day!

It's 7:20pm and the concrete guys have just finished up!  The poor guys were working out in the dark and cold for the last few hours.  K helped them through the day, but they did the finish work alone.

This is the picture K sent me in a text at 2:15 today:

"Check it!"

It was probably about 30 degrees in the early evening when they were working.  And once the sun dropped out of the sky, the guys were working in the dark by truck headlights, work lights, and little LED headlamps.  Pretty amazing stuff.  I watched them from the patio door.

 

Now they're putting the insulated blankets on the slab, and they'll let it cure overnight.  K will cut lines into the slab tomorrow. 

K is EXHAUSTED.  She worked this morning at 7am, then left at 11:30 to come home and help with the concrete.  She's overtired, but still thrilled.  I can't wait till she's done with the cuts tomorrow, and then the relief can really set in.  Already tonight, she got excited for a moment -- "All the boring stuff is done, and now comes the fun stuff!  The framing!"  And she means it -- framing is her absolute favorite.  And this time she'll be building something that will belong to her, to us.

Finished Prepping For The Slab

Lucky for us, this weekend was gorgeous!  We were able to get so much work done for the slab, and now it's all prepped and ready for inspection and pouring the concrete.

Started out with me taking a trip to the rental place to get the plate compactor/tamper, again.  Since the one didn't work well last time, we got a credit for another use.  This time the machine worked like a champ.

We put down all the rock and soil that we had, and got it compacted really well.  K dug trenches all along the sides of the form.  She's making a reinforced slab, so it can carry the weight of the garage and hopefully won't crack too much in the future.

In this picture, you can see that we really had to build up the left side of the garage floor to keep it level.  The ground slopes quite a lot in the back yard, so we dug down the right side a bit, but still really had to add to the left side.  The floor does slope to the front just a little, and the driveway will slope down to meet the existing asphalt.

The next step was to add a layer of poly as a vapor barrier.  The garage will be heated with some kind of space heater, and the poly will be there to help keep moisture from seeping up from the ground into the concrete slab.

It was a windy day, but we got the three long sheets of poly stapled to the sides of the form and taped along all the seams.

Next was the rebar, and we did this mostly in the dark, so I only have one photo.  K put rebar posts into the ground every few feet, and then we connected two rows of rebar to those posts, horizontally.  These will give strength and structure to the thicker sides of the slab.

It was pretty chilly by the time we were working on the last of the rebar, but we got it done.  K covered up the whole thing with tarps again last night, and this morning she called the inspector to see about getting it looked at.

Really, really hoping we can get that slab poured this week or next.  It will be a big load off K's mind to have that done before the cold sets in.  And then she can work on her plans for the building and materials, and take her time.  If the cold and snow holds off, maybe she will start building this year.  And if not, she will be good and ready by the spring.

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!! 

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!

Our Spacious Corner Lot

Our spacious corner lot...  is even more spacious than we had envisioned!

An important part of the preparation before K can build our garage, is to figure out our actual, physical lot space.  Sure, we could have it surveyed professionally, but K knew she could do it on her own.  (As she would say, "I'm a Hollander!" and they like free stuff, so she says.)

Armed with the map of our lot from the county's website, and strong skills on Google Sketch-Up, K did hours of computing and measuring, trying to determine where our lot markers would be.  Once she knew where our neighbor had a lot marker, she was able to finish her calculations and had a pretty good idea of where all 4 of our lot markers would be.

And she was right.

Yesterday, I helped her measure from the neighbor's lot marker to where ours should be.  And it was there!  Hiding just under the dirt, next to the retaining wall.  The previous owner had bought an adjacent lot from the railroad in 2000, and maybe he also put up the tall fence, so the lot was surveyed in 2000.  Meaning our markers are new, legible, and actually not too difficult to find (once you know where to look, that is.)

Within the next 24 hours, K found the other 3 markers in our yard, and had strung neon-colored string between each of them.  We could really see the dimensions of what we own, and it goes back quite a ways behind our house.

Our yard is big.

That means...  Big garage.  And space for a garden, a patio on the back of the house...  Totally possible.

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!