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.

 

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.

 

It's Been 1 Year!

One year ago today, we got this house!  After a couple months of working on loans and wishing, and things came together on the morning of June 8th, 2012.


After our final walk-through, just before our closing.  Taken by our fantastic realtor, Brian Amiot.

Reflections on our first year as owners of a fixer-upper...
#1  --  Nothing will go as quickly as you imagined.  K and I both knew that, in theory, when we started all this.  But I think that we still expected to be further along by now than we actually are.  We don't even have ONE room complete.

#2  --  Yardwork is pretty fun in the first year!  It's the only immediate gratification that we've had so far, and it's been a great feeling to see the yard improve and see our curb appeal change.  Yardwork will probably become a drudgery, eventually.  But for now, it's been a great way to spend sunny evenings and weekends together.

#3  --  This house is going to be cute again someday.  I still believe that, and it still gets me excited to think about it.  All our big plans, and our little plans, will happen with time. 

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.

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.