I'm alive, I promise.

This is just a quick note to say that I haven't been doing much on the house lately.  Life is good and I've been spending time enjoying the yard rather than working in it.  I feel like I've earned a tiny break even if I do start to feel lazy at times.  All of those plans I had to replace the west fence and paint the cement slab . . . well the sun finally came out and there's all this beer to drink and friends to entertain and weekends to spend out of town.  

The last year has been crazy and fun and I've been really happy.  It's been hard sometimes, feeling like I needed to justify doing something that makes me happy (people seemed oddly fixated on the fact that I was single--it's great to buy a house but why not find a HUSBAND first?).  A lot of people hate home improvement so they regard me as a lunatic with no life.  But how often do you get to acquire a whole new skill set at your own pace?  I learned how to do basic plumbing and electrical and how to build a fence and tape drywall corners and I never once worried about getting fired.  I also love hosting and cooking for people; I'd haul out another 1900 pounds of concrete for the simple joy of splitting a bottle of wine and dinner with a friend in my newish backyard. 

Now I just have to deal with people who expect that I'm constantly in the middle of some home improvement project. 

"What are you working on now?  Gutting your kitchen?"

"Um . . . the plants have filled in?"  I also changed the lightbulb in the bathroom.  JEEZ, LAY OFF ME.

Those piles of dirt are still in front of the house . . . I'll get there eventually.

Garden therapy

I've moved to a new schedule for summer term where I work four ten-hour days Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off.  That means I get to play all weekend with my friends but I still get a full day to work in the yard and get my garden therapy.

This section is in between the new hillock and the area where I found the hatch with all that buried concrete.  I wanted to remove the grass and mulch it and put more plants in so I'd have one uninterrupted stretch of landscape along the new fence.

But there was basically a field of dock (Rumex) which looks like this:

They're sort of pretty.  Except that they spread like crazy and their roots look like this.

You have to dig them out with a shovel because they're HUGE.  It sucks.  Short of rototilling that area, I didn't see any way to eradicate it without using herbicides.  My last ditch effort was to put down an insanely thick layer of newspaper under the mulch in an attempt to choke out the dock.

A side note: Newspaper is awesome for weed suppression until the neighborhood cats cruise into your yard and think, "Phenomenal. She built a gigantic litter box for us."  Their digging exposes the underlying newspaper and the bark dust gets flung around.  I love animals but outdoor cats can suck it.

Lelo had recommended that I goth up my garden by adding some dark dramatic plants to break up the green.  Black lace elderberry, dark purple euphorbia, and black tulips should do the trick. The fact that you can make wine from elderberries had nothing to do with this decision, I swear.

Despite all the hillocks and topography I'm building, that mountain of dirt out front isn't shrinking.  I'm starting to suspect it's multiplying at night.  I found a bottle of scotch lying next to the dirt pile the other morning.  I can only assume that the dirt pile is getting drunk and amoral while I sleep.

I'm apparently worse at math than I thought.

Filling the smaller, lower section of the vegetable bed took about two cubic yards of soil.

I assumed it would take about four yards to fill the larger, taller part.  I also wanted to build a hillock in a section of the yard, so I estimated about five yards of soil.

Oh man, that's a LOT of soil.  Like, a crazy amount of soil.

It's way way way too much soil.

I got the second part of the bed filled and had barely made a dent in the pile.  So I started digging out the grass from the area where I wanted the hillock.  My neighbors were concurrently using a sod cutter to do the exact same thing in their yard.  I felt like a sucker, doing it by hand, until they encountered problems five minutes in and spent half the day trying to get the machine to work.

I had it all cleared before they finally gave up on the machine.

Then I started piling soil where the yard sloped dramatically back toward the fence.  I decided to embrace this dip and just designate the dipping area as a mulch zone.  Trying to mow the lawn in this area caused the lawnmower to accelerate dramatically down the hill toward the fence.  It looked bad and it was frankly dangerous.  I'm accident prone and I was probably close to losing a toe.

I grabbed some extra ferns and bleeding hearts I had lying around and put them in, along with the flowering currant and ocean spray I bought for this spot.

I picked up a hosta and a Little Honey oakleaf hydrangea for this dry, shady area.  I think I'm going to move the hydrangea over to the right a bit and plant some foxglove, wild ginger, and maybe an akebia (a vining plant that smells like chocolate!) to twine up the fence. 

I need to get some color over here, yes?  And then I want to put in a bench so people can canoodle in this corner of the yard.  And then I think I'm going to replace the no-privacy fence.  Because I have the fever.  The fever for spending more time and money on my yard.

New bedroom light fixture

The weather has been awful here.  I'm starting to feel like those children in the Ray Bradbury story where they live on Venus and only see the sun for two hours every seven years.  I obsessively check the weather widget on my iPod and expend more emotional energy than is necessary fretting about rain.  A friend has taken to calling it Junuary.

You know who doesn't care about the rain?  Lupine.  Lupine is the big dumb hippie at the festival, high on mescaline, STOKED that it's raining again.  We're having a party!

My penstemon is also doing well.  I'd read that they don't usually bloom the first year after being transplanted but, lo and behold, the start I put in two months ago is blooming!  I think it's because I bought this plant from the Master Gardener sale.  

 

Heather, this has nothing to do with light fixtures, you're thinking.  I know!

Rain was forecast so I had written off yard work for the weekend.  I decided I should clean the house, which meant I ran around doing anything I could to avoid vacuuming.  I recently ran across a fixture I bought at Ikea last summer in the basement.  I have no idea where I was planning on putting it.  Why not put it in the bedroom?  Not that the existing fixture wasn't awesome:

The glass part that should hide the bulb was missing, so I had a bare bulb hanging from a very dirty ceiling fan that wasn't properly anchored so it heaved and chugged if you tried to use it.

That's just a little bit better, right?  WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS A MILLION YEARS AGO?

You'll never guess what happened.

I found more weird stuff buried in my yard.

Some sort of stainless steel shelf was buried about three inches deep and covered with rocks.  Again, I didn't find anything buried underneath it, which begs the question, "WHY?"  Why bury these things in the yard rather than putting them in the trash?  Or is this some bizarre attempt at weed control?

Can you imagine what I'd find if I actually rototilled the entire yard?

The deal with the post

The biggest thing that was stressing me out about the fence was the corner post.  We discovered while we were ripping the old fence down that it wasn't in the ground; it was just sitting on top of a rock.  A rock that was part of the retaining wall in the other neighbor's yard.  Hmmm.

I wasn't sure what we were going to do about it.  The post-digging kid started to try and dig out the rock, but it went really deep.  We decided it was better to leave it.  Luckily for me David is a genius.  He suggested putting in a stringer, like we did for the vertical board fence.  I bought braces and we cut a small section from an extra 4x4 and braced it to the retaining wall post.

Then we used small pieces of 1x4 to attach it to the side fence.

The view from neighbors' yard:

Not bad, right?

Cue the Etta James

At last . . .

I have privacy!  I have a fence!  Two different kinds!  

Why?  It's sort of a long story.  

Basically, I never noticed that there's a dramatic elevation change as you move from the yard on the left to the yard on the right.  It drops about two feet along the length of my yard.  So when the ten foot posts went in, down in the neighbors yards, they were really sort of short on the right.  So short that if I put in the horizontal boards up like I planned, the fence would be under five feet at the right side.  So we put a vertical board fence on the right (it matches that neighbor's other fences) and a horizontal board fence on the left.  

My friend David, he of the arbor vitae removal, lent his expertise and helped me build this.  I have the most amazing friends.    

I can't tell you how heavily this project was weighing on my mind--there was an issue with the corner post that I'll write about later and it seemed like weird things kept coming up.  For an entire year I've had this stupid fence hovering over me and it's like a giant weight has lifted.  Did I stress about this fence more than was necessary?  Absolutely.  But, you know, this is me we're talking about.  Being tightly wound is my thing.

My friend T remarked that the vertical boards make the patio look cozy, like an outdoor room.  That's officially the new reason we did it this way!

I'm hoping to sweet talk my Twitter friend Lelo to help me pick out some shrubs to fill in the gaps around the perimeter of the yard so that someday I won't even see the fence.  Hooray for getting back to obsessive plant ogling!