Hydrangea Report

I've been very excited to see how my new hydrangeas would survive the winter, especially since they were transplanted, divided, and pruned late last summer, which is exactly when you aren't supposed to be doing any of those things to hydrangeas.

Originally this was one huge bush that inadvertantly got split into four smaller bushes when my friend JoAnn decided to dig it up to make way for some new landscaping in her yard. I decided to go ahead and prune them rather severely because I figured what was left of the root ball(s) would have a hard time supporting the plants if left as is. I knew that I'd be removing most of the pre-formed flower buds but figured it would be worth it for the eventual health of the plants.

I got exactly three blooms on two of the four bushes. I guess that's a lot better than nothing. And instead of the regular solid hydrangea blue, they were sort of a variegated lavender.  Maybe the cement piers under the porch are making the soil more alkaline?  Anyway it will be interesting to see how many blooms I get next summer and what color they'll be.   So here is this year's batch of blooms:

Hydrangea Bloom #1

 

Hydrangea Bloom #2

 

And on the other bush, Hydrangea Bloom #3

 

 

Foundation Plantings

Last fall we saw some plants on sale for cheap at Home Depot and decided to go ahead and get a little bit of foundation planting happening, now that we finally have gutters.  These were sort of impulse purchases and we'll move them somewhere else if they don't seem suitable in a few years.  We have to start somewhere though so we might as well put in some pretty ones.

 

 

I can't remember the name of the rhododendron on the left, but it has the potential to become rather large, which I think will look okay at the corner of the house.

 

 

In the middle we have three knockout roses in the pale "Blushing" pink color which will hopefully grow together into one large mass. They are supposed to bloom all summer long. I think the pale pink looks nice against our gray siding.

 

 

Doug saw the rhododendron below and on the right in the upper picture and he just had to have it.  It's a very pale pink with darker pink edges.  It will hopefully stay on the smallish side - it's supposed to be a dwarf variety.  We'll see.

 

So far they've survived without the deer munching on them.  But we did use deer spray over the winter.

 

The hill by the fence used to have a retaining wall instead of a hill.  We planted a nice row of azaleas that were mostly in the shade of our former house.  Then the house got torn down, the retaining wall got taken out, the liriope got planted, we got busy building the new house ourselves, and the hillside got completely overgrown with weeds and vines and the azaleas have suffered from a combination of too much sun and strangulation by weeds.  I've been pruning the dead wood to see if they'll perk up, but I'm not too hopeful.  They look pretty sad.  I guess I'll leave them in for now and see how they do now that the weed situation is lessening.  I can't wait for the liriope to finally take over! 

 

I'm sure I'll be pruning them some more, but I think I need to do it in stages for now.

Liriope - April

I've made good headway on the liriope hill this spring - it's all trimmed, mulched, and ready to go.  And that's a far cry from where it was when I started clearing out the 2-3 foot high weeds last summer.  I'm really ready for this liriope to fill in and beat the weeds.  We'll see how that goes.

A little bit of decorating...

 

I haven't done any blogging in a   L O N G  time, much longer than it might seem by the date of this post (because I post-dated it).  I have spent so much time these past several years totally focused on construction stuff that when it stopped happening I became rather frustrated and discouraged and annoyed and I really didn't want to share all of that negativity here.  The ever-present well-intended question "So how's the house coming along?" with its subsequent non-answer from me would inevitably bring on a temporary bout of  depression.

So to review, the last thing that has happened with the house, construction-wise, was when I stained and polyurethaned Doug's basement steps while he was out on tour in early 2011.  Although to be fair, other things have happened since then, on the outside of the house.  We put in a little wall by the front steps, and Doug FINALLY put all the gutters on the house (after five years of not having them) and took down that ugly tree stump.  We planted my friend JoAnn's hydrangeas by the back porch, and I started the still unfinished process of getting the long-neglected liriope under control.

Inside, I wander around, looking at all of the raw edges of wallboard around all of the door and window openings and ask myself  "When is this ever going to get done?"  That's one of the reasons I've been spending more time working outside than in.  Most of what needs to be done inside requires Doug's skills and participation, in addition to my own.

Even though I don't really consider myself a do-it-yourselfer, I guess I've become one of those people.  It's really true that anybody can do just about anything if they put their mind to it.  So I suppose I'm going to eventually have to teach myself how to do finish carpentry if I ever want my house to be finished.  But this wasn't how it was supposed to be.  We were supposed to have a builder do this work.  It was supposed to take (OMG, how awful! people would say) a whole entire year.  So after the five+ years went by, I am especially grateful that we finally got to the point where we were allowed to move back in.

In spite of all this griping, I'm not as depressed as I was during the really awful (dirty, physically grueling, injurious to the hands) parts of the construction process - all that sanding, vacuuming, nailing, installing insulation, sweeping, lifting absurdly heavy things, wallboarding, painting, flooring, etc.  I'll do it, but I'm not someone who likes getting dirty.  So spending time not doing messy work is actually kind of uplifting.  And this year I can honestly say that I felt happy most of the time!

Anyway, we spent a few days at my friend Jennifer's house in Connecticut, both before and after our China tour in December and January, and it felt absolutely wonderful to be there in her beautiful home.  She has spent years and years combing antique stores and junk stores and auctions for fantastic bargains.  Her house is so tastefully decorated, yet fully of personal flair and pizzaz, and just about everything in it is a gorgeous antique that she got for practically nothing.

Since this is something she loves to do, she took Doug and I along to one of her favorite places and whenever I admired anything she would of course say "You should buy that!"  So I bought some things - a few pictures and other odds and ends.  Since my mind had been on other things for so long and I lost pretty much everything in the fire, I really didn't have much stuff of my own to work with, physically or mentally.  And in case you can't tell by now, I'm sort of a first things first kind of person, so decorating an unfinished house had been kind of the last thing on my mind. I still haven't unpacked most of my boxes of books for that very reason.  But those two paintings and a print that I picked up while I was up there pretty much got me started and I've been decorating my walls ever since!  It makes a huge difference to be able to live in pleasant surroundings instead of bareness or clutter.

So when I got home I got busy.  I finally decided that I wanted to hang that leaded glass thing that I doctored up over the TV instead of in the stairwell.  I think it makes the TV a lot less noticeable.  I painted the bench behind the couch a slightly darker color to match the fuzzies of the couch fabric.  The rocking chair and those other two chairs under the window will eventually live out on the back porch when it stops being a lumber storage area.  The two pictures on the right are oil paintings that I got for a good price at a "vintage" store when I was visiting Jennifer.

What I especially like about my living/dining room is that I can easily shove the bench and couch towards the TV to make plenty of room for larger chamber music groups.  I've had as many as nine in here at one time and it's fine.  And people have mentioned that the sound is good in here too.  It's really great to be able to have people over to play after all this time.

Between the couch and the kitchen is this rather unattractive wall (below) with the pass through to the kitchen.  It will look good one day.  The two blue areas are supposed to have built-in bookcases, but that hasn't happened yet.  As I said before, I have not unpacked most of my books yet.  I figure that the longer they stay in boxes, the easier it will be for me to get rid of most of them, since I apparently don't really need any of the stuff in there.

However, the longer they stay in boxes in that location, the easier it will be to not do anything about getting those bookcases finished.  So I guess I need to do something about that.  At least the majority of the room looks halfway decent now.

 I sort of chose my wall colors by feel.  First I picked colors that I knew would make me feel happy to be amongst, and then I tried to make it so that you could see a different color through each doorway.  And then somehow I ended up with pictures that had colors from the preceding room in them.  It was sort of a happy accident, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.  There's still a lot of makeshift stuff going on, like that Aerobed in the front foyer, because it's the darkest and most private room in the house for an overnight guest in the morning.  Although it doesn't have curtains, the windows are high enough that no one can look in.  And there is a door between the foyer and the living room.

 This picture in the foyer is an old print from an antique store in Connecticut.  It has some of the same yellow-green that's in the living room.

I picked up this print of an etching of St. Cecilia at Savage Mill.  It was really nicely framed and in excellent condition.  The naked cherub doubling as a music stand is a nice touch.  I looked it up a while back and found out that the original oil painting was done in 1620 by Domenichino Zampieri, and 100 years or more later someone in France did the black and white etching of it.   And mine is a print of that so I guess it's kind of a third hand version of the original.  And that's just fine with me.

 

So things are looking up.  Who knew what a difference a little interior decorating would make?  It's nice to be pleased by your surroundings.  I highly recommend it!

finished the slipcover!

Almost.  It's far enough along that it looks finished to the casual observer and that's good enough for now.  I want to do something with tabs and buttonholes  and covered buttons so that the band around the circumference will be more fitted.  Then I want to get some firmer foam for the seat cushions and cover them in a more tailored way.  I also want to make some throw pillows with the leftover bits of fabric.  In my spare time.

Here's the original pattern.  As I mentioned before, I had to do something different with the skirt because I didn't have quite enough fabric in the $3.00/yard remnant to follow the pattern exactly.  That's how it ended up getting all fancy.

Here's the end result and a couple of other views.  I'm not sure why I didn't take a full picture from the front.  Maybe I didn't feel like moving the coffee table.

Although the appearance of this couch has been vastly improved, over all I'm not that impressed with the whole idea of slipcovers, now that I've done one, or at least I'm not impressed with the drape and tie variety.  It's kind of makeshift, even if it doesn't look that way.  Actually it sort of does look makeshift, but I can live with it for now.  I sort of want to see if I can figure out how to actually reupholster the couch properly one of these years.  We'll see.

Hydrangea Heaven

I have always loved hydrangeas.  We used to have a huge old Pee Gee hydrangea growing right outside by the corner of our bedroom but sadly it went away along with the rest of the old part of our house.  I've been wanting another one ever since, but have hesitated because of all the deer that we have running around here, eating everything in sight.

Finally I broke down and bought myself a pair of Endless Summer hydrangeas and some deer spray, which actually seems to work quite well.  It stinks when you first spray it on, but then the smell goes away.  Apparently the deer can still smell it for about 3 months afterwards, so it's a pretty easy solution as long as it works.

The one we planted by our front steps is doing really well, but I neglected to plant the other one for about a week and it got dry and droopy a couple of times and died shortly after I planted it.  That'll teach me.

Then suddenly my friend JoAnn had a hydrangea that she needed to move.  It was enormous - about 4 or 5 feet across, with absolutely gorgeous blue flowers.  I had spent the summer admiring it, full of hope that one day my own little hydrangea would get that big and healthy.  It was so huge, and she couldn't figure out where else in her yard to put it, and then when it broke into four pieces while she was digging it up, she decided to offer them to me!

So I am now the proud owner of four(!) offspring of this lovely bush which are now gracing the hillside outside of my not-yet-screened-in back porch with their glorious beauty.  I can hardly wait to see them bloom and grow next summer.  And I like the fact that they remind me of JoAnn whenever I park my car in the back, which is pretty much every single day.

After we planted them I gave them a pretty hard pruning so that the root systems could establish themselves in their new location without having to work too hard to feed so many leaves and flowers.  The deer gave me some further assistance later that evening:

So we got right on spraying them with the deer spray after that.  Although hydrangeas are not the most practical choice for our location because of the deer, the fact that they'll get morning sun and afternoon shade is ideal.  I really want them to thrive.

Another less than ideal situation is the fact that they were divided and transplanted at the end of the summer when it was still quite hot.  Hydrangeas can apparently be a little delicate and sensitive during warm weather, so Doug rigged up a couple of screens to give them more shade while they adapt.  We took them down about a month later after the weather got cooler.

So now I'm just waiting and waiting and waiting until next summer to see how they do.  I'm absolutely thrilled to have ended up with an entire row of blue hydrangeas!

August Home Improvements

We've made a little progress on our house this month. Nothing major - just a few little cosmetic improvements to make our house an even more pleasant place to live.  The first thing we did was to pick out and install the glass for the tops of our cabinets.  After all this time we finally got around to it - because we discovered that there's a really cool glass store in Kensington that has all kinds of different glass textures.  I wanted something slightly wavy and I found exactly the style I had in mind.

You might notice that the sample moulding piece I made way back in October of 2009  is still languishing up there on top of the cabinet as are the actual lengths of moulding that I painted and got all ready to go in March of 2010.  I have I feeling I'm going to have to do it myself if I want to ever get it installed.  All that's left to do in the kitchen, besides the door trim and the baseboards is this top of the cabinet moulding and the shoe moulding around the floor.  That's it.

After I get everything else done, hahaha, I want to take a class at the glass studio and learn how to do this:

I stole that picture from their website so I'm assuming they will teach people how to do leaded glass.  If you look around my house (or this blog) you'll see that I have a thing for clear leaded glass (as opposed to stained glass).

Considering how I had to live for five years of my life, I guess you could say I'm fairly adaptable and tolerant of things not looking the way they ought to.  I was absolutely horrified at myself when I first hung this construction paper over the bottom halves of the windows in the living room a few months ago to keep people on the street from looking in and being tempted by our new TV.

Doug has in the meantime informed me that if someone wanted to steal a TV they'd be going after a much bigger one than what we have. What do I know? I didn't even have a TV for six years after the fire and I think the one we got recently is huge.

Anyway, after a while I sort of got used to the construction paper on the windows and it wasn't until a couple of my good friends gently reminded me that this really isn't a good look for the living room that I decided to buckle down and make some curtains.  I've them on four windows on the main floor and four windows upstairs.


I think it's a big improvement, marred only by the fact that there is no window trim or baseboards there yet.  But you can't have everything now can you?  So why not put up curtains before the window trim is finished?  After all. we've got to keep the order of doing things UNUSUAL in order to maintain any kind of consistency around here.

When I was in South Carolina I bought a coffee table at an antique store for 75 dollars which I think is a pretty good deal.  It's very cute.  Check it out:

The table is oval with a glass top.  It's exactly the right size to go in front of the couch.  And if I get tired of it in the living room, it's metal, so I can paint it with rustoleum and put it out in the not-yet-screened-in back porch.

Next up is finishing the damn slipcover for the couch.  It has been languishing upstairs by the sewing machine for over a month.  I lost my momentum due to the sheer tediousness of sewing all of those long seams and then it got interrupted by curtain making and a dress.  (A dress!!!)  But now it's time to get back to it.  Sigh.  Here's what it looks like so far:

I'd almost rather pull weeds than work on this slipcover, so wish me luck!!!

Gutters Finished!

I'm happy to report that Doug has finished installing the gutters.  He did a beautiful job on them and is now I'm sure feeling quite relieved to have finally finished something that he'd been putting off for a long time.  I am happy about the water no longer hitting and wearing out the porch roofs from the roof above, no more lack-of-gutter induced erosion around our house, and no more sprained ankles caused by these grass-covered areas of erosion for me!  And there won't be huge amounts of water pouring all over me and my bass whenever I go to or from my car during a rainstorm.  Not anymore.  Yaaay Doug!

Here are some photos of his excellent handiwork:

I think the house looks a little more finished now with the gutters on.  And now we'll be able to do some foundation planting too.

I like the way he's got the downspout from the gable gutter on the right heading directly into the porch gutter.  And the porch gutter's downspout goes into an underground pipe so there will be no erosion on that hill

Doug decided to use brackets to attach the gutters to the house instead of the big long screws that go across the gutter.  He thinks those are more prone to coming loose.  Hopefully ours will be less prone to coming loose because I think this was a lot more work.  But sturdy is good, especially with gutters.

He spent a lot of time relocating and declogging these pipes which come out on the other side of the driveway.  He installed these pipes under the driveway about 15 years ago and they just sat there in a state of neglect.  I'm glad they are finally being used for their intended purpose.

Now I'm actually looking forward to getting some rain so that we can enjoy the greatness of his gutters.

our new crape myrtles are blooming!

We are so excited at how well our five crape myrtles are doing.  For a while we thought maybe they wouldn't bloom during the first year after we planted them (last fall).  But they are now in full bloom and they look extremely happy out there all along the front sidewalk.  Our crape myrtles are called "Muskogee" and they are supposed to grow into medium sized trees that will stop growing just before they get to the power lines.

We are ever so slightly disappointed at how pink they are - it seems like they were less pink and more purple when we bought them last fall.  They almost matched the front door.  I guess I'm just going to have to go for a blending of various shades of blue and purple now.  That will probably look better than the matchy-matchy effect anyway.   I wonder if our soil has slightly affected the crape myrtle color?  It makes a huge difference for hydrangeas.  I also wonder whether our new hydrangea will eventually switch over to being pink in its new location.  I guess we'll have to wait and see!

Ladder Rack

We are working on a bunch of different outdoor projects here in Foam Core Fantasyland and we've even managed to finish some of them, and almost finish some others.

• The World's Biggest Tree Stump is long gone and tomorrow we will be covering the area with sod so it will be as if it had never been there.
• We put weed fabric behind our new retaining wall and backfilled it with topsoil.  Tomorrow we will also top that soil with sod.
• Doug has been working to find and de-clog the drain pipes he installed under the driveway about 15 years ago so that we can hook them up to the gutters and not have a lake in our driveway every time it rains.
• I cleared out a space for the other hydrangea we bought on impulse about a week ago and it is now planted near the back door.  It looked pretty sad and wilted so Doug pruned it back quite a bit.
• Doug built a ladder rack so the ladders will no longer be piled up in the dirt.  They look very tidy now and he also figured out a way to make rollers so they are much easier to put away.  And they can be locked so no one will be able to steal them.

gutter madness

The delightful flurry of activity continues, with Doug finally being in the mood to put gutters on our house after six long years of not having them.  However, the past two days' attempts to buy what we need so that we can finally have these gutters has been less than delightful.

Yesterday I drove all the way up to the Gaithersburg Roof Center to pick up some gutter hanging brackets and clips.  Doug had called ahead to make sure they had what we needed so I thought it would be a relatively short and simple errand.  Wrong.  For starters, somebody misinterpreted something Doug said so they had to look up the number of the proper part, which took just about forever.

Finally they said they had those in stock, so I paid for them, got my ticket and went out to the warehouse pickup area to get them.  The first guy came out, looked for them for about five minutes, came back, shrugged his shoulders, and said "We don't have them."  That's it.  The second guy was sure he'd be able to find them and spent a lot of time conducting a thorough search, but still came up empty-handed.

He escorted me back to the service center where I watched them all act is if  the fact that the inventory was showing something that the warehouse didn't have was the main area of concern.  After they finished discussing that highly improbable situation amongst themselves and got over their indignation at the realization that an error had occured, they finally realized that I was still standing there waiting patiently, apparently for nothing, and they said "Now we're going to have to credit this back to your card" like it was my fault that they had sold me something they didn't have in stock that I had driven all the way up there to buy, based on inaccurate information they'd given out over the phone.  There was not a single word of apology or regret over the situation.  The only impression I got about how they felt about it was that I had inconvenienced them in some way and that they were doubly annoyed because they had to deal with the existence of their own incompetence.

I didn't say anything - I've been in plenty of situations that have been far more challenging to my patience than this one was.  There are plenty of people out there who will not take responsibility for any errors and that lack of caring is what causes sloppy work to happen and also eliminates any perceived need to apologize for the sloppy work.  That kind of attitude makes it impossible for those kinds of people to be conscientious in any way.

So no apology for that mess.  I will give him credit for offering to call the other Roof Centers to see if they had what we needed in stock.  He found out that I could get the parts I needed if I went to two other stores, so I left feeling momentarily hopeful that I would be able to get this taken care of relatively quickly the next day.

Unfortunately Doug's phone calls this morning to the two individual stores to verify that they really did have what we needed resulted in us temporarily going back to square one because they actually didn't have everything after all.

So we decided to give up on the Roof Center and try our luck with Seamless Gutters.  They said they had everything we needed so I went on up to their store in Gaithersburg and bought the brackets and the clips and took them home, happy that there'd been such an easy solution to the previous day's frustrations.

No such luck.  They entered the order correctly but put 6" brackets in the box instead of the 5" ones we needed.  They weren't labeled in any way and although I looked to make sure they were the kind we needed, I did not notice that they were an inch too big.  The size difference is not noticeable when there are 40 of them piled inside a cardboard box, but they need to be the right size and they weren't.

After lunch I took them back and was full of hope that this would be an easy and simple exchange.  No such luck.  And of course they didn't have what we needed, and I again received a refund and no apology.  So that was two wasted trips to the Seamless Gutter place in one day.

I don't know what tomorrow has in store.  I have managed to maintain my usual veneer of calm over an undercurrent of mild annoyance at the huge amounts of my time that have been wasted.  The fact that I can take pride in my ability to remain calm in the face of rudeness and incompetence has kept me from losing it so far.  And I think any tendencies that I previously might have had to become frustrated in these kinds of situations have been severely dulled as a result of my experiences over the past six years.  It's either so constantly present that I don't even notice it, or I'm unable to feel it because what would be the point?  Or I'm now completely immune to frustration - who knows?  Maybe I'm just too tired to care.

Doug, on the other hand, is livid.  He plans to go up there and let them have it tomorrow.  I am worried that he will cause some sort of scene and they'll beat him up or have him thrown in jail.  He is very frustrated.   I don't know whether to accompany him in a show of support or not.  I don't like to see him acting the way he's going to act and sometimes my efforts to calm him down just make things worse.  So wish us luck!

Although my dealings with these people have been unsuccessful so far, I still believe that if you want people to help you, you've got to make sure they want to help you.  In other words, treat them with respect even if they don't deserve it.  Maybe that's my whole problem.

A New Wall

Our front porch area is starting to finally look rather civilized, between all the weeding  and us putting in the little retaining wall last week.  We even put our very first foundation plant - the lovely hydrangea you can see in the picture below.  Isn't it pretty?  I hope it likes it there.  And the wall is a perfect height for sitting.

I've started attacking the weeds next to the fence and have made some good progress.  It's going to take forever to get it completely under control after so many years of neglect.  I pruned those two azalea bushes to about half of their former size because vines had killed many of the branches.  That'll teach me.  Hopefully if I manage to get all of the weeds out and throw down some mulch it will be easier to deal with in the future.  All that liriope I planted had better hurry up and spread the way it is supposed to.

no more giant tree stump!

I've been on a roll lately with getting things happening around here.  There's been an unexpected and completely delightful spirit of cooperation in the air that has caused many good things to happen recently.  Doug's brother came over with his chain saw the next day after we pulled down the stump and he chopped it into manageable pieces.  I was able to take about a third of it to the dump.  Doug put the rest of it out by the street, hoping someone would help themselves, and about an hour after I got home the rest of it disappeared.  So that was easy.

Also this week we've been building a wall near the front steps.  Between all the weeding of the liriope and this cute little wall, our front yard is starting to look pretty spiffy!

T I M B E R ! ! !

We have had a really ugly looking 20 foot tall Norway Spruce stump adorning our front yard for almost four years .  It has been irritating me every single time I've had to look at it, so that's been almost 2000 different times during the years since the electric company cut the top off of it.  Although I've mentioned it a few times, I'm apparently really really patient and I don't like to nag, so nothing has ever come of it - until today.

Every time I mentioned getting a chain saw and just cutting it down myself, Doug has said that I should wait because he wanted to pull it out of the ground so that there would be no tree stump. I'm not sure how this happened, but all of a sudden Doug responded to my most recent threat of chopping it down myself and today was the day we finally got it down. Doug did most of the work, but I sawed most of the tree roots so that it would come out of the ground easily.

Isn't it hideous?  I think it is a real eyesore.

At first Doug toyed with the notion of attaching it to his car and pulling it down that way.  Fortunately he changed his mind.  I guess he didn't want to end up in one of those Darwin Awards videos.

He decided instead to use his magic pulley.  This is the same pulley that Doug used to lift the all of the foam core panels up to build the roof of our house and that we later used to build the front section and the front porch.  This pulley has amazing powers!  It will lift or pull hundreds of pounds, maybe even a thousand.  He attached it to an unused concrete pier near our foundation at one end and to the top of the tree at the other end.

After the rope broke he used a chain around the trunk instead.

We also decided to cut most of the big outer roots with a Saws-All.

Now we're making some progress!

Watch it come down in this exciting video!

Yaaay!  It's down at last!  Now all we have to do is chop it up and take it to the dump.   And that WILL be happening tomorrow!  Yaay Doug!