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.

Taking Down The Tree

First of all, I want to say that I really have mixed feelings about this particular project.  It's been very hard for me to participate in the destruction of such a large living thing...  But I was able to talk myself into being positive about it because of three things:

1)  The tree was not healthy.  It has some kind of disease-- not Dutch Elm, I don't think, because the bark is fine.  But the leaves were really weird looking last year-- it looked like bugs were burrowed into them.  I'm still trying to identify what caused that.  A bunch of the big branches had been dead for years, and it was scary to have those reaching near our house and power-lines during storms.

2)  K needs to build her garage.  Where this tree stands is the best place to put the garage.  It's right behind the house, just off of the alley, and it makes the most sense for moving vehicles and her work trailers in and out.  The sooner she builds this garage, the better!  There are so many projects for the house that she can be working on in the garage -- shelves, kitchen cabinets, trim, etc.

3)  We have so many other trees!  Last year, our yard was just a JUNGLE!  It was all leaves and barely any sunlight hitting the ground.  Once this tree is gone, we will still have a bunch of medium-sized trees along the alley, a line of tall trees along the railroad track, a large ash in the side-yard, another huge elm just outside of our fence, the craggy crab-apple tree in the front, and at least 2 trees along the street (these probably belong to the city).   We are basically ringed by trees, which still offer great protection from the wind, and probably still give more shade than I want.  I'd like to have a garden this year.

K and our neighbor have plans to do a great trade this year -- he used to be a tree-trimmer, so he helped us cut down this tree!  And in return, she'll build him a nice-sized shed in his yard.  A couple days' work for each of them and everyone wins!  Bartering is still alive and well, when it comes to home-owning neighbors.

Three hours of work on the tree on Saturday, and about 1/5th of the branches were cut down.  This is what resulted:

My adorable lumberjack

And then a FULL day of work on Sunday.  We were out there all day!  K was out there way past dark.

Now it's down to just the trunk!  Amazing!:

We also have a gigantic brush pile, now, with all the branches.  We'll rent a chipper and turn this all into a huge pile of mulch for the garden and yard.  And more firewood than we'll need for a while!  Next year, these logs should be ready to burn.

Cape Cod Style?

Our little house is a pretty traditional Cape Cod style, which was popular in the 1950s.

Picture from About.com

K is thinking of putting a couple of dormer windows out the front of the house, to make it a little more interesting.  And that would still fit with keeping the style authentic to the time period.  It would also change how the roof is vented, so we wouldn't need those square vents on top anymore.  The ones that are on there now are rusting, and I wish we didn't need them because they interrupt that long, continuous roof.

Picture from About.com

But in doing dormers, I thought it looked a little too traditional, considering that we are going for mid-century modern on the inside.  We can do whatever we want to this little place, let's make it fun! 

I pulled out my newspaper and magazine clippings and showed K a few houses that really caught my eye.  The difference between most of these houses and our house, is that they are ranches with long, low roofs, where ours is a 1.5 story with a totally different roof line.  But K understood what I meant-- let's incorporate some of these lines where we can, and she hopped back on Google Sketch-Up and started altering her plans.

How can we mesh a look like this with our house?  We're working on it..

We plan to do cement-board when we replace our siding, and so we started looking at our color options for that.  There isn't a huge color selection, so it was pretty easy to come up with our "palette." 

Cement board palette + door paint

I can't wait to paint the front door something bright!!  I'm leaning towards a turquoise or teal, right now.  I had been thinking about an intense green, but once I saw these siding colors, I think that something with blue in it will be better.

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!