Category: Houseblog

It’s been a few days since my in-laws returned to New Jersey. While they were here, they kick-started a ton of projects around the house, including replanting the beds in front of the house (formerly hidden by our trees), getting the junk out of the pathways around the garden beds, and the front porch repainting and baseboard preparation I mentioned on Sunday.

On Tuesday night I took the new nailgun and started installing the baseboards. The only problem I ran into was lack of accessible studs on some walls—meaning that two of the molding strips have one end that is attached to nothing, at least until I find a way to glue or otherwise affix them more permanently to the wall. I was also disappointed to note that the electric nailgun was not quite sturdy enough to drive a 1″ brad all the way into the stud; I ended up having to hammer every one down for the last quarter inch. But the work went much faster and was much more precise than if I had to drive the nails by hand. Next steps: fix those two loose ends, caulk the gaps between the boards and the walls where the walls aren’t quite square, and touch up the paint.

Incidentally, a long belated shoutout to the folks at HouseInProgress.net, who blogrolled the Houseblog department a while back and whose energy and dedication to their remodel has frequently shamed me into taking action on our projects, which are much less onerous than theirs.

We spent a lot of time this weekend in the oft-neglected older half of our house. For those just coming in, our abode is a bit of a Frankenhouse, with a big 1999 addition with master bedroom, great room, and garage added onto a Craftsman cottage that started out around 1916 and grew over the years into a five-room house. Unfortunately, we hadn’t spent a lot of time on the original portion of the house since renovating the bathroom, and there was a lot of work still left undone.

This weekend we started to reverse the process. Yesterday Lisa’s dad and I measured and cut the baseboards that we never got around to adding to the newly remodeled bathroom. Today, Lisa and her dad primed the cut ends of the boards while her mom and I started scraping and applying caulk and spackle to various nail holes, cracked boards on banisters, and so on in preparation for painting on the old porch. I also ran to the Home Depot and found that the most economical nailgun for applying molding was an electric model that I bought for about $10 less than I could have rented a pneumatic model and air compressor.

So tomorrow night is cut out for me: popping moldings into place with a nailgun, a little touch-up paint, some caulk, and the bathroom is almost all done. Just some trim to go over the doorjamb and we’re set. Heaven only knows when the paint on the porch will be done.

I just got done with Easter dinner with Lisa and her parents, after spending seven hours at church (like AKMA, I was up at 5 for a sunrise service). Four services’ worth of singing, including four performances of the Hallelujah Chorus, took a lot out of me, but fortunately the veal roll with arugula sauce and potato and tomato casserole put a lot back into me.

Also have to give a big thumbs up to the Planeta Winery, whose Santa Cecilia has to be one of the most incredible reds I’ve tasted recently. Big full bodied fruit up front just bursting with flavor, yielding to a softer but still intense almost-vanilla aftertaste.

Now to nap, hopefully.

(Thanks, Tony, for the link, and belated best wishes to you and Mox on the “nuptials,” however April Foolish. If two bloggers with such diverse political views can find connubial bliss (or even nubile bliss), there’s hope for us all.)

Here is that before and after shot I promised. You get a sense of how much airspace has been added in front of the house.

To do today: dig out some pine needles and ascertain the extent of the damage to the soil where the tree branches overhung their beds; plant some hardy native groundcover; and, oh yeah, get some shopping done for Easter dinner.

Well, six hours later, the tree guys have wrapped up and headed on out. They did a fantastic job. The trees actually seem to belong now. They actually ended up taking out a small spruce that was dead most of the way up and leaning back toward the house. Fortunately its small size (less than 4 inches in diameter) meant we didn’t need a permit to remove it. They were also able to give the small cherry tree a lot more room and light, so it should start growing stronger now.

And wow, it looks like a whole new house now. From the street you can easily see the whole house—which, since it stretches sideways across the lot, looks enormous. You can also see the lack of work we’ve done on the front landscaping, so I predict I’ll be giving that a fair amount of attention over the next few weekends. In fact, I think I’ll head outside now and do some cleanup, now that I can see what I’m doing.

Lisa and her mom are at Heronswood right now for the spring woodland garden showing, but when they get back with the camera I’ll post before and after shots.

I’m working at home (WAH, in the inevitable Microsoft acronym) this morning so that I can answer questions from Davey Tree as they trim up the overgrown pines in our front yard. They’ve already done the heavy lifting of the removal of branches up to about eight feet from the sidewalk and removing the small spruce that was dead most of the way up and growing back toward the house. Now they’re doing the finesse work: pruning the deodora cedar so that it doesn’t overshadow the cherry tree, getting some of the deadwood off the cherry, handling any remaining thinning on the pines.

The dogs have been mostly good, though there’s been a bit more barking than is ideal. But when a chainsaw and a tree chipper (and two strange men) are in the driveway and the front yard, who can blame them for a little bark every now and again?

In other skippable life news, our plumbers are back! This time they’re running a gas line up into the kitchen for our new oven, which will be delivered today. We had a really hard time deciding, but we finally decided to go with the Gemini.

Incidentally, do you know how loud a hammer drill is when it punches through tile? Neither did I, until just now.

I finally got the side yard overseeded and fertilized again yesterday, taking advantage of our bizarre 80° heat and sunshine to do a little yard work. Just in time: it’s fifty and raining today, so at least I don’t have to water the new grass.

And in more excitement, our dogwalker starts today. I actually get to put in a full day at the office without driving home to let our bichons out. I think they knew that something special was happening this morning; they woke us at 4 am and never quite calmed down for the next two hours until our alarm went off.

Other busyness: the UPC production of the Brahms Requiem is Friday night. My voice has, I think, finally recovered from the nastiest cold of the year, which had me under the weather for almost ten days.

It’s been a busy week. I think it’s a good sign on a number of fronts that work has been a blur of productivity as I work on a very important deliverable. I’ve actually been eager to get out of bed in the morning, and that hasn’t been true for a long time.

On the house front, we’re finally upgrading our stove to a gas model. Tough decision between two Maytags, this model and the Gemini. The cheaper one has five burners, unusual on a standard 30 inch range, but the Gemini’s safer control knobs (mounted on the top, away from potential little hands), higher BTUs, and of course dual ovens make us think seriously about spending the extra couple hundred bucks.

It also appears we’ve finally resolved the tree dilemma which has nagged us since before closing the deal on this house. Rather than outright removing the big trees in front, we’re going to limb them up about ten feet and remove some of the smaller pines that have grown up in between them. Should greatly improve light and air circulation in the front of the house. And reduce the pine needle problem: one of the trees sheds so many needles that they can’t all fall to the ground. They just build up on the lower branches like dandruff. Fire hazard, anyone? I’ll try to post some before and after pictures once the arborists are done next week.

Yes, the time has come for our puppies to go get the Big Snip (or in Joy’s case, the Big Incision). And none too soon, in Jefferson’s case. Last week in obedience class he, erm, “marked” two cones that were being used in the training session. The trainer scolded him a little and then asked me across the room, “When’s he going to get fixed?” I was able to answer that his time was coming on Monday the 23rd.

And now the time has come. We’ll have two sleepy, somewhat sore dogs tonight. They were a little confused and excited this morning when we drove them in, and hungry no doubt too, but otherwise seemed OK. We’ll see what they’re like tonight after the “tutoring.”

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of vasectomy humor, my all time favorite cartoon on the subject, from The Far Side (“I’m going to get tutored!”). The runner up, in Berke Breathed’s Outland (“I don’t remember being asked about the vasectomy…”) doesn’t appear to be available online.

Concluding the house nightmares of my three day weekend: if you had been outside my house at 1:30 on Monday afternoon, you would have seen a wet, desperate man on our roof, swearing, with bleeding hands pulling muck out of a gutter.

No, I didn’t lose my mind, and no, I didn’t miss cleaning our gutters so much that I decided to do it in the middle of the pouring rain. But circumstances, alas, forced my hand.

We were sitting on our couch watching a video and waiting for the rain to let up, when I felt a drop on my head. I looked up and didn’t see anything, shrugged, looked down—and felt another drop. This time when I looked up, I saw a slight dark ring around the base of our ceiling fan. “Uh-oh,” I said. I thought a shingle had blown off, or maybe some of the high winds had thrown a heavy branch onto the roof and poked a hole in it. And this was in the new part of the house—the roof was only four years old.

So, swearing, I checked both attic spaces but couldn’t see through to the affected section. I pulled the blueprints for the addition out of the garage and studied the roof line. It looked like there was a ridge running right up the middle of the roof section on the outside, joining the main roof right above the fan. So I assumed there was a problem with the ridge shingles.

I grabbed a flashlight and headed out the bedroom window. Walking the roofline, I didn’t see anything obvious, just a few places where the high winds of the last few months had undone all my hard work on my gutters. I pulled a few clumps of pine needles free at the upper end and let some accumulated water drain down. Then I walked to the lower side, where a valley formed between the new roof and the old roof, and allowed water to drain off into a short section of gutter. Or should have. I saw a deep pool in the valley that must have been several feet long; plunging my hand in, the water covered my thumb knuckle. I cursed, and started rooting around trying to find the blockage.

About ten minutes, and several barked knuckles, later, I finally found that if I applied slight upward pressure to the shingles from the new roof that sloped over the bottom part of the valley, I could slip a few fingers inside and scrape out the foul swampish muck that was blocking the water from draining. The pool emptied, and I came back in. I think the pool had backed up far enough that the water rose above the protective rubber seal in the valley and came into the inside of the roof, where it meandered until it found its way down around the ceiling fan.

So far there have been no repeats of the problem, but I won’t be messing around. We’ll be hiring someone to come out and cover the gutters, and have a good look at what can be done to prevent the valley from blocking up again.

So much for great days off.

It was an exciting weekend around the house. On Sunday afternoon, Lisa and I got outside to do some long overdue garden cleanup. We hadn’t done much weeding, or anything else outside, since the dogs arrived. So we took our tools and let the dogs run around, secure in the knowledge that our yard was securely fenced.

Or so we thought. I was getting ready to help Lisa transplant some roses when I looked up and saw Joy, our 6.5 pound little girl puppy, run behind my compost bin. I didn’t think too much about it, but when I stood up a second later, she was gone. I couldn’t see her anywhere.

I walked the fence line calling her name, thinking she might have just scampered along under the bushes. Then I doubled back to where I had last seen her and my heart sank. Where the mound of ivy in the back corner of the yard had been flush against the ground, it was now pushed up and there were signs of a small creature having gone into the ivy. I now had visions of something horrid with poisonous teeth having bitten our dog as she stumbed about in the ivy. I continued to call her name, but with no avail.

We enlisted our next door neighbor, who was doing gardening as well, but he didn’t see her in his yard. I returned to the ivy again, and pulled back more of it until I got to the corner where our back fence met our neighbor’s. Or more precisely, didn’t. I could now see a four inch gap between the two fences, just big enough for a six pound dog to wriggle through.

At the same moment, our neighbor called from the yard behind his, “I found her!” She had gone through the gap into the yard diagonally opposite ours, which fortunately was also fenced, and was sitting puzzled listening to me call her name, as if (our neighbor said) she didn’t remember how she got there and couldn’t figure out how to get back. I held the ivy up again so I could see the gap in the fence and called her name, and this time she figured it out and came running back.

I picked her up and held her close. She seemed puzzled as to what all the fuss was about. I reunited her with Lisa and Jefferson and we all shuddered for a second in gratitude that the problem wasn’t worse. Then we took her inside for a good bath—she was filthy.

Oh, the emergency maintenance I mentioned? Sometime today or tomorrow, I’m ripping all that ivy out by the roots and putting a patch across the gap in that fence. No way I’m going through that again.

Lisa and I were engaged seven years ago yesterday. It was a romantic Valentine’s Day engagement, with all the foreknowledge and planning that phrase implies. Neither party was surprised by timing or question.

What was surprising, given our joint culinary abilities, was how bad the meal was. We cooked in Lisa’s one bedroom apartment, which had a teacup-sized galley kitchen that was quite big enough for the meal we wanted to make. The meal was typically simple in scope, elaborate in details: duck breasts with blackberry sauce, angel food cake with orange glaze; vegetables that have been forgotten; and white wine with appetizers, Châteauneuf-du-Pape with the duck, and champagne with dessert.

Or that was the plan. The catch? Several. The angel food cake took a long time to assemble from scratch and there wasn’t enough room in the kitchenette to make the duck. So we didn’t start the duck until after 9 pm. The next catch was the provenance of the duck: it was a gift game duck from my uncle. I removed the breasts easily enough, but cooking it proved another challenge. I found the meat tough after the initial searing and pancooking and decided to try to braise it to soften it. Forty minutes cooking in liquid later, it was still like shoe leather. In fact, we couldn’t cut it with a steak knife. But we could drink wine, and did, and so the proposal happened and the disaster of the rest of the meal was almost forgotten.

This year, on the seventh anniversary, we decided to try the recipes again. Yesterday. This time the duck was farm-raised, and that made all the difference. I could have reduced the sauce longer, but what the heck. And substitute a sparkling moscato for the champagne, and we had a great time.

After the big snows we had (relatively speaking) in January, it’s weird how nice the weather has been this week. Most days have started out in the mid thirties and climbed to the mid fifties, and there’s been enough sun to make me pop the roof open on the car a few days. Meanwhile our crocuses (croci?) are starting to pop open, the irises and other bulb flowers are putting up green leaves, and I heard pine cones popping open over my head while I was walking the dogs yesterday. And it’s not even Valentines’ Day yet.

One thing the sunlight is doing is making me realize how behind we are in our weeding and gardening. Our beds are ragged and untidy and we haven’t pruned any of the trees. I feel a little like the guests are getting here to the dinner party before we’ve swept the floor.

We had a surprise yesterday: our little girl puppy, Joy, is now too big to fit comfortably inside her fashionista doggie bag. Our little guys are growing up…

We decided that it’s time to take down some of the gates that we’ve used to keep them out of parts of the house, in the process opening up a hallway they’ve never been in. They were doing running yesterday through the hallway and barking once each time they turned the corner, like a lap counter. It feels more like our house again with the gates down.