House Made

stripes!!

Beth planted iris largely for me. They are my favorites. I was so charmed when two or three bearded blooms popped up that first year. Well hellooooo little flowers! Having no bulb experience, I had no idea that they would all mass reproduce every year! Okay, exciting! You plant one, you get like five back!! Everything should work that way. Flora dividends.

So it’s been good and springy for the past two weeks and we’ve been rewarded with CLUMPS of iris. Tall, slender, vibrant, somewhat leany thanks to a lounging neighborhood cat called “Duchess,” and cheerful. That’s what I want from my flowers. Cheerful. I would like to have one of the following reactions to flowers: 1. Oooooooh (interesting, huge, or smells awesome) or 2. Awwwww (charming, sweet, homey). Both of those should be subcategories of the aforementioned “cheerful.”

Thank goodness I went out and snapped a few photos of my lovely iris because this weekend we had unseasonably warm (mid 80s) days and mythical (in the Bay Area) warm nights. While I love the warmth, it took a toll on our delicate iris. Today is a bit crisper so perhaps they’ll bounce back. If not, though, I have this pic to remember them by.

Beth here.

House Made got hacked. Again. We’ve been working double-time to get everything on the site cleaned up and fortified and such, which is annoying. Some hacker must get immense satisfaction from stopping our moms from reading about our scintillating home improvement projects.

The site did have a minor trojan, so if you came here in the past week or so, you may want to run a virus check. Google has flagged the site as dangerous, which makes me feel all tattooed and pierced.

Let us know if you run into further issues. Thanks for reading.

Shout-out from Merideth:
And mad props, wait, I mean MaDD ProPZ, to Mike for being a great source of humor and encouragement as we tried to solve the problem.

Beth here.

At House Made, we are very protective of our tomatoes.  If other vegetables encroach upon the Designated Tomato Area, they are ruthlessly chopped back, or, in extreme cases, yanked out altogether.  During the summer, the dog is put on squirrel and mouse patrol to keep them out of the garden (a job she has taken to with vigor and a surprising amount of understanding).  And now, due to some scrap lumber, remedial carpentry skills, and a few nice weekend afternoons, our tomatoes have some cold frames to get them off to a great start.

This is my first real building project.  Usually I am the brawn and measuring behind a project and Merideth does all the cutting and putting together.  This is because she has difficulty with anything approaching math, and I have difficulty with all saws outside of the reciprocating family.  But for this project, I did it all as I figured straight lines weren’t imperative.  While the tomatoes like to be protected from cold, they are not as concerned with aesthetics.

A key goal for me in this project was minimal storage.  We have a one-car garage for storage, and Christmas takes up half of it.  Now, we could cut down on the ornaments, but who’s going to tell Tiny Tim?  Is it you? Later in the summer, I’m not going to want these cold frames in the garden anymore and I needed to get them out without damaging plants, so all four sides separate from one another and will be able to be stacked flat against a wall.

I used all wood from other projects around the house, only needing to buy hardware to get these up.  Note my use of a gate lock to hold up the lid when I need to get to the plants.  I’m especially proud of that.

My tomato seedlings ship at the end of March.  I can’t wait.

 Beth here.

Almost three years ago (Three years, you guys!  It seems like yesterday.), I seeded our back yard with much expectation for a beautiful green lawn, and ended up with what looked like a vacant lot with a few grassy weeds covered with birds, who apparently love seed.  I learned many valuable lessons from the experiences of seeding a lawn and blogging about it:

1. People (namely male people) take lawns very, very seriously.  If you even hint that you want the tiniest bit of grass advice, you will get it in spades and vehemently.  
2.  People (namely crazy people) are very defensive of Lisa LaPorta.  And really, who can fault them?  She’s adorable and can do a lot of home remodel with a couple thousand bucks, even if I do question at length where she can find some of her products/services at insanely low prices.
3. If you seed a lawn that is on a slope, you will get a lot of beautiful grass…at the bottom of the slope.
4. If you ignore the problem for three years, the lawn does not magically fill in.
5. Seeding is not so much for me.

Enter the tax return.

Due to the many, many stairs to our backyard, we hired out this project to a neighborhood landscaper who tore up the backyard on one Saturday…

…and then made it gorgeous on the next Saturday.

(If you’re wondering, that pole in the middle is one half of the hammock-holding system.  It looks much better with hammock.)

We are now watering it like crazy to get it established (the variety itself is drought-resistant, but apparently not on day one), and the dog has been sequestered on the patio and kept occupied with a butcher bone, because she’s not allowed to spend her day playing Keep-That-Squirrel-Away-From-My-Yard-at-All-Costs and other similar games.

*I made up some Latin.

Every once in awhile, a public agency gets it right, and the collective agency at Stopwaste.org of Alameda County Waste Management Authority and Alameda County Source Reduction and Recycling Board is a great example of this.  Please forgive my public love letter to my garbage collection guys and gals.

As part of the Garage Cleanup 2008 Project: Phase I, Merideth and I took four years’ worth of toxic materials (paint, wood stripper chemicals, what have you) over to the Household Hazardous Waste Center on Saturday, and it was a fantastic facility.  We just loaded up the back of the truck (oh, how we love the truck), and went through a drive-through where hazmat-suited men emptied everything out and sent us on our way.  We didn’t even have to get out of the cab.  The best part is that we can be sure that all of those chemicals will be disposed of properly and reused when they can.

I know that when hazardous disposal isn’t easy, people take shortcuts, so I appreciate that the folks at Stopwaste.org have created such a streamlined process.  I could actually go on and on about how much I love this agency and how thoughtful their weekly collection process has made me about what I throw away, but let’s just leave it at this: I hope other U.S. cities/counties look toward Alameda County as a shining (not literally, as it’s waste disposal and all) example.

More to come this week that isn’t about garbage when I remember to download the pictures.

beloved hammock in the spring

This is our hammock. It’s my hammock, really, as I lay in it probably 80% of the available yard-lounging time. I love it. A hammock just says “Hey, quit that working. Bring a book and an adult beverage over to my canvas lap and enjoy the breeze.” Well, after the last wind storm (which I did NOT know was coming) grabbed the hammock and whipped and twisted it around like a big stripey America’s Cup spinnaker, the post on the left got decidedly loose and leany. It had already been a little off 90 degrees due to some initial Quickcrete meets sodden-clay setting issues back when we first installed it but it was nothing we couldn’t live with –  nothing that wouldn’t keep my swinging butt safely suspended.  After the wind storm, though, a suspended butt was no longer in the offing.

Enter Beth! (I should totally write her a little piece of introductory super-hero music for moments like this.) Saturday she came up the back yard steps with bags of concrete, a shovel, and rebar. REBAR–friend of the hammock or swingset lover! She dug out the old post and reset it with re-enforcements. It now stands plumb and EXTRA sturdy (though currently without hammock as it is raining), just waiting for the first warm sunny hour without chores. Beth should really hate the hammock for the way it lures me from her MSWord project lists. Clearly she spoils me.

This post is dedicated to Beth’s sister Mindee for whom discussion of project fixes relieves boredom.

Okay, so remember when Beth accidentally stripped the finish off the tub?

Well it’s been driving her mad ever since. The idea that she had to intentionally make a fat, warbly, crappy caulk line around the edge of the tub in order to hide the old brown color peeping through was too much. It aggravated her every single day. While this minor tragedy has put the idea of replacing the tub back on the table (Yay! New tub that will actually cover more than 1/8″ of your body when filled. Boo! Tearing out of tub and tile.) that project is a little way off and I really wasn’t sure if Beth could find peace with her shower time without some kind of interim remedy.

So, I got some of that annoying caulk tape stuff that you stick on to avoid the messy hassle of properly caulking your shower area. So after a good 6 hours of prep including COMPLETELY removing the old caulk and thoroughly prepping the surface for good adhesion, I stuck on the caulk tape. Once applied, it made the tub look like a tub in a mobile home, or a motel, or maybe an old vacation cabin. It is not ideal. It is not pretty. It IS prettier than the old brown enamel and it IS prettier than the caulk line that, to be clear, did not bother me but made Beth want to, as she said, bang her head against the wall repeatedly. And it’s something we can totally live with as a temporary solution. Would I ever recommend this as a way to finish off your new tub or sink installation? No way. Is it better than hearing your partner sob in the shower? Absolutely.

sign in front of our house

No, I’m?not talking about hatred for the street sweeping. Nuh-uh. I’m talking about hatred for the *#!%$!%$ FIFTY dollar ticket we got last week because, randomly, the truck decided not to start which, therefore, kept me from moving it out of the street sweeping zone. The truck. Truck discussion counts as house blog stuff right? It IS the truck that hauls all the stuff for the house projects. Right? Right. P.S. do you know how frustrating it is to know you’re going to get a $50 ticket and not be able to do anything about it? Pisses you right off.

I was pretty sure the battery had just given up any desire to hold a charge. It was pretty old and I did leave the lights on all day a couple of weeks ago. Turns out 1980 trucks don’t ding at you when you try to exit the car with lights a-blazin’. (Ok yeah, here comes the “start small” portion of our story.) So I thought, we’ve done a helluva lot of stuff to this house successfully. Changing a battery can’t possibly be harder than, say, installing a toilet, drilling post-holes with a gas powered auger, moving electrical outlets, or putting in an insinkerator. If we could do that, we could swap the old truck’s ticker. Turns out yes, that is a task that is well within the ole skill-set. And that small step has effectively determined what the post-house project will be: restoring the truck. Bring it.

Note: Because I’m now used to the random weird stuff you find when working on an old house, I was not suprised AT ALL to find similar weirdness in the old truck. Turns out the battery hold-down bracket which should keep the battery snugly in place was missing. The battery had been bouncing around the inside of the truck like a big electrified, acid-filled lego block. Nice.

Looks like we should have a little break in the weather starting tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed. All this inactivity has us itching to get to some projects. In the meantime, as promised, here’s beth, the guitar hero prodigy, playing gh in her jammies. Cuz that’s how we roll.

But here are some photos to tide you over until the crazy storms stop trying to wash us all into the bay.

I’ll try to take one of beth rockin’ to Guitar Hero to add to these.

Dixie taking her christmas nap with me

Dixie going to town on her new wrench chewie