Care of Cows

A Beautiful Mess

2011-01-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

A recent warm spell has broken, and along with clouds and chilly weather, there's a bit of rain. This gives me a nice excuse to take a break.

I've been tearing up the back half of my back yard: a 10 x 25 foot rectangle (plus a little 8 x 4 foot bit off in the corner).

As I've likely mentioned, my yard has a lot of roots, a lot of rocks, and a lot of clay. So I didn't expect miracles when I borrowed my dad's rototiller. But it's really worked. I occasionally need to pull out the pickax to get through a rough spot, and I've chopped out about 10' of roots and 3 buckets of rocks. But the topsoil is looking good, and the earthworms may not be happy about the churn, but there's lots of them.

Over in the corner (that little 8 x 4 bit), I was able to get up quite a mess of hard dirt and weed and mulch it over. I'm not quite sure how I want to rehabilitate that patch, because I need to be able to walk (and drag a wheelbarrow and lawn mower) over it, but I figure leaving it covered for a year or so won't hurt it, and it gives me time to think about my options.

The big section is where I want to put in raised beds for a garden. I'd also like to put in a nice avocado tree.

Now that the ground is mostly prepared, I need to figure out what I'm using to build the beds. I'd been thinking cedar or redwood (2" x 12" x 8' boards, to make 8' x 4' x 2' high boxes), but now I'm considering interlocking concrete blocks of some sort. I'm planning to make up my mind next weekend, so that I can get started.

I'd really like to grow my own tomatoes (and carrots and broccoli, and maybe grapes) this year.

The strawberries are giving me encouragement. My one little plant has spread out to cover its whole patch of dirt, and both the parent and all of its offshoots are in bloom. Hopefully the return of winter weather won't hit them too hard.

Oh, Hey -- It's 2011

2011-01-08T18:11:00.001-08:00

Hi there. Remember me?

I guess it's time to do one of those "2010 in review" posts, and fill in all of the things that I worked on, but didn't blog about.

That raised bed from the front of the house that I was emptying out? I finished emptying it. I also knocked out the concrete blocks that had formed a short retaining wall for the bed. I am grateful for the existence of sledgehammers and wheelbarrows. (The transplanted bulbs survived, and are loving my back yard.)
The gate on the west side of my house was warped, broken, and termite-riddled, with a decoration of peeling red paint (possibly 30+ years old). My dad and I took it out, and the new gate is straight, whole, and weatherproofed with a lovely honey-yellow stain.
The section of fence facing the road on the east side of the house was missing a board, bowed, termite-riddled, and leaning. I hypothesize that the previous owner took that section of fence out temporarily while removing her jacuzzi, and didn't put it back quite right. (I also think the kids next door used the gap where the board was missing to squeeze in and retrieve balls they'd hit over the fence.) My dad and I took it out, and the new fence matches the gate on the other side (but taller).
In the garage, I took out a section of shelving that was too narrow to be useful, and put in a wire shelving unit from Home Depot. It's worked so well that I'm planning to take out the plywood shelves on the west wall of the garage, and replace them with another shelving unit.
I bought my very first Christmas tree this year. It turns out that I had a number of ornaments and decorations that I'd acquired over the years: just enough to fully trim the tree.
I took out the unused track over the master bedroom closet (which hasn't had doors since I moved in), and my brother-in-law came over and helped me hang a new curtain rod. Having curtain doors on the closet is working very well.
I bought a new bed, complete with a full frame and headboard, and moved my old mattress on to the frame in the guest bedroom, which is now ready for company.

In 2011, I hope to both do, and remember to write about, the following projects:

Tear out the combination of weeds and crabgrass in the back yard, and put in raised beds and mulch.
Start my very first garden in the raised beds.
Start a compost pile. (I have a small compost pit at the moment, but I'd like to start composting more efficiently.)
Put down paving stones where the raised bed used to be out front, and put potted plants over that.
Tear out the other raised bed out front, and figure out how to fill in the exposed area. I might just plant grass, and extend the lawn a couple more feet.
Choose a contractor, finalize a plan, and remodel the guest bathroom.

I'll stop there, because I actually have a very long list of projects, and I have to keep reminding myself that I can't do them all in one year.

Happy New Year, y'all.

The Mystery of the Random Noise

2010-07-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

For the past few days, I have been hearing a strange, very loud noise.

The first time I heard it, I was getting ready for bed, and I just about jumped out of my skin. It was a rumbling, scraping, thumping noise, and seemed to be coming from inside my house. But when I turned on all the lights and looked around, I couldn't find an explanation. Nothing had fallen. Nothing was out of place. It definitely was not associated with an earthquake.

Ultimately, I figured that my neighbors must have been moving furniture in the corridor between our houses. It was the only remotely plausible explanation I could think of. It did sound a little bit like the noise of moving the trash bins around--just louder. A lot louder.

I heard the noise once the next day, and then once more when I was on the phone with a friend. By this time, I was pretty convinced it was my neighbors dragging things around, though I never did see them doing it. I was trying to figure out how big a thing they must be moving to make so much noise.

As I was getting ready for bed last night, I though I spotted ash around the front of my fireplace, but I was tired, so I decided to ignore it until morning.

This morning, I noticed feathers mixed in with the ash. "Of course," I thought. Birds must have been fighting over who got to use my chimney as a perch. Wings and talons on the roof might sound like the noise I'd been hearing, and the attic space might amplify the sound. A big clump of ash falling down the chimney would make noise, too. (I don't use the fireplace, so I didn't bother to get the chimney swept when I moved in.)

I fetched the dust pan and small broom, and peered through the glass doors and metal screen into the fireplace, wondering how big a task I was facing. A mourning dove peered back.

After talking it over with my dad, I decided that the best strategy was to open the outside doors as wide as they would go, and close all the interior doors and window curtains. Then I opened the fireplace glass and screen. Much to my relief, the bird was still strong enough to fly, and it took her mere seconds to find and take advantage of an exit.

How do I know it was a her? The egg under the fireplace grate was a dead giveaway. (Sadly, falling from the grate to the concrete cracked it. Not that it would have been likely to survive in any event.)

So now the bird is free, the fireplace is cleaned, the flue is closed, and the mystery is (hopefully) solved. And I won't be so quick to blame my neighbors for strange, random noises in the future.

Ruining More Gloves

2010-06-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

Today, I went to the gardening store and bought:

Organic citrus fertilizer
Organic rose fertilizer
Worm castings
Cedar mulch (small bark chips)
A dahlia plant (yellow flowers, very pretty)

Then I came home and finished transplanting the bulbs from the front bed (for a value of finished that ignores some stragglers at the edge of the bed that may end up as compost). I hope that most of them survive the move. I'm not exactly the world's most patient person, even when I'm not in the blazing hot sun with dust in my eyes and dirt under my fingernails. So I didn't exactly use great precision and care in placing the plants. I sort of stuffed them into the dirt where I could find room, then threw handfuls of leaf mulch over them, then dumped a bunch of water over that. (I was a little more careful with the bark mulch.) Now I'll just have to wait and see how much dies back and how much keeps growing.

Out in the front, I took a couple of wheelbarrow loads of dirt out of the nearly empty bed. On the positive side, Mother Nature took care of one problem for me: one of the big stumps out front turned out to be well rotted through. I pretty much just had to pick up the pieces and throw them in the yard waste bin. On the negative side:

The dirt was packed tight against the bottom of the stucco (a big no-no, since it gives subterranean termites easy access to the walls).
Roots were stretch just under the dirt, snug up against the foundation, for the length of the bed.
There are slugs and spiders, but I didn't see a single earthworm in all the dirt I dug out (meaning it's probably not worth saving the dirt to use elsewhere, but I don't have anywhere to get rid of it).
There are rocks, rocks, and more rocks. (The white rocks brought in for decorative purposes, the local rocks that proliferate in the area, and the rocks that the local kids like to throw at houses and at each other. Since I know which house has the green rocks and which house has the rose-colored rocks, I can at least take those back.)
The dirt the plants were in is only about 5" deep. Under that, it's clay. Hard clay. Very, very hard clay. And rocks. Did I mention the rocks? (I need to take the bed down about 9".)

And then I took a shower and made lemonade. The lemonade was delicious. I might drink the whole 3/4 gallon this evening. The end.

Dirt Under My Nails

2010-06-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

My attempts to transform bits of my backyard into actual growing space are coming along. Over the past couple of months, I've put in some experimental plants here and there, and most of them are doing just fine. I did have one daffodil die, and my lavender isn't entirely happy, and I'm not sure the columbine is supposed to look like that, but the gladiolas that I transplanted a couple of months back are blooming, and my strawberry plant is fruiting for the second time (and fruiting, and fruiting, and fruiting), and all of my succulents and drought-resistant experiment plants are growing faster than I'd thought possible.

I've been working for at least a month now on one patch of dirt next to my patio. At some point, someone decided to put in plastic as a weed barrier, and then covered the plastic with gravel. I discovered this as I was pulling out the thick-packed crabgrass. (Turns out, a weed barrier doesn't do much good when the pine tree from next door and the crabgrass from under the fence keep poking holes in it.) So I got the weeds out, and the plastic out, and most of the gravel out. And then I put some decent soil in. And then I decided that decent soil might not be enough, and put some fertilizer in.

Today, I decided that the fertilizer was probably cured enough, and I started transplanting bulbs from the bed along the side of my garage. (This is the bed I have to take out because it's too high, and drains into the foundation.) I have about a third of the bulbs moved to their new home. They've been drenched, and mulched, and given a pep talk. Here's hoping that they like it in the back. I'm very much looking forward to finding out what they all are. (I know the gladiolas, because the ones from the front yard are just ending their blooming season, and I remember there being daffodils last year. Mostly, I've just been making sure the pointy end of the bulb is up, and hoping they dig in and start growing.)

Now that I've finally had the tree service out to take out the unfortunate cypress trees in the back (they'd been mangled by someone before my time), my back yard is opened up, and I'm trying to figure out how to turn the hard-packed sandy clay (contradiction? apparently not) and yellow, drying weeds into an actual garden. A friend's husband has been passing along old copies of Organic Gardening magazine, and another friend loaned me a copy of J. I. Rodale's How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits by the Organic Method, plus I saw these raised bed kits at Home Despot...

All I can say for now is that I have a good mix of grass and leaf mulch cooking in a can out back, and a bunch of pencil sketches. We'll see what comes of it.

Digging in the Dirt

2010-04-19T20:07:00.001-07:00

Today is the first day in a while that I didn't spend any time working on my yard. As the days get longer, it's becoming more and more inviting to shake off the tensions of the workday through a little hard work.

At first, I was just pulling up weeds and trimming bushes. But there was this stump by my patio from one of the ficus trees that my dad and I took down. I started off trying to churn up the dirt around the stump, to see if I might be able to put in some plants. Next thing I new, I was digging up all around the stump to get the roots out. Then I had most of the stump exposed, and a lot of the surrounding roots gone. And then it rained. Some things about clay:

Rain does make it pliable and much less like rock.
Wet clay clings to things, like shovels, pickaxes, hand spades, pruning shears, and stumps.
Wet clay is slippery.

Still, I did get that stump out, which proved two important things:

I can dig a stump out all by my own self with the tools I have on hand.
I should have known better.

Fortunately, I didn't do any permanent damage to myself, even with all of the slipping on wet clay and falling on my rear end. Even better, after a few more days of puttering (pulling rocks from the dirt, breaking out clumps of clay, mixing in gardening soil, and adding fertilizer), I made a new place to plant! At the moment, I have columbine, lavender, and...some other plant with purple flowers acting as my soil testers. I've put down leaf mulch and bark mulch, too.

(I still have to figure out what to do with the rocks. Before you suggest it: these aren't pretty, border type rocks. These are ragged and ornery rocks of highly irregular size and appearance. I have this idea about putting them through a rock chipper to make gravel. Only I don't think there is such a thing as a rock chipper.)

So now I have two more areas around the patio to clear of weeds and rocks so that I can start amending the soil (which I think is a hilarious term for a messy process) and planting stuff. And then I can move on to the rest of the yard!

It may be unending, but it's more rewarding than the similarly eternal process of prying weeds out of the lawn. At least once I put in flower and vegetable beds, I can mulch enough to at least partially suppress the weeds. (Please don't taunt me for my youthful optimism.)

Furniture!

2010-02-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

Guess what I did this weekend?

Okay, not the part where my dad and I chopped down 2 ficus trees to clear the way for a new back fence. Or the part where I spent 3 hours raking leaves and pulling weeds. Or the part where I rested from all the back-straining work and read some books.

I bought furniture!

That's right: somewhere between 3 and 8 weeks from yesterday, my house will have actual company-worthy furniture. I bought a couch, 2 living room arm chairs (in 2 completely different styles, from 2 manufacturers--I hope it works as well in practice as it does in my head), and a recliner for my bedroom.

Why a recliner for my bedroom? Well, I've been in physical therapy for back pain for a while now, and I'm thinking that part of the problem is that I don't have a lot of choices when I want to sit and read. I'm allergic to my futon (until I get the smoke smell out), and my computer chair is best for computing. So I spend a lot of my downtime reading (or doing sudoku, or talking on the phone, or whatever) in bed.

Besides, it's a really comfortable (though not entirely esthetically pleasing) chair.

The couch isn't really what I had intended to buy when I went out shopping. I had this idea of getting a simple couch with clean lines and relatively high arms in a contemporary style and (possibly) a striking color.

I ended up with the most comfortable couch of all time, with a traditional shape and dark brown upholstery.

As for the chairs? One has a nice, contemporary look to it, in a somewhat boring color with nice dark accents. The other has a traditional look to match the couch, but in a striking brick color. (I remembered too late that the accent pillows I already own are burgundy. Oh, well. They'll go well with the recliner in the bedroom.)

Now all I need is a rug to put the recliner on so that it doesn't scrape up my laminate floors. But I have 3-8 weeks to work that out.

Retrospective

2010-01-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

In 2009, I bought a house. This involved an fatiguing search, a frustrating purchasing process, a painfully exhausting preparation for move-in, a flood, various plagues of vermin, plenty of hard labor, the emptying of my bank accounts, and a fence that decided not to stand up any more. It has also involved learning to paint, replace a doorknob, put in a faucet, prune and fertilize a rose bush, pry out roots with a pick ax, get advice when I need it, ask for and gratefully receive help, and use a circular saw. It has also involved taking joy in little things: colors that I picked on the walls, a clean sink, a high-efficiency toilet, a working irrigation system, a washer and dryer of my own, and a thermostat.

I have a lot of work ahead. Once I have acquired the money to put the new fence in and get the trees pruned, there are windows to replace, and a master bathroom to expand, and a kitchen to redo.

In the meantime, there are plenty of projects requiring more sweat then dollars. There are plants to get in the ground, and improperly-placed flowerbeds to move, and a garage that just needs a few shelf adjustments to be just right. (Over Thanksgiving weekend my dad and brother-in-law moved my workbench, extended the gas and water lines, and moved my washer and dryer. Today, my dad got the workbench level and secured to the wall, and we added more pegboard to the wall behind and next to the workbench to help organize my tools. Between those changes and the trash that my dad is hauling to the dumpster for me, the garage is looking amazing. And there's plenty of room for my car, too.)

Here's to a fantastic 2010.

The door

2009-11-10T19:45:00.000-08:00

When the garage door repairman came to rescue me last week, he let me know that I have a top-notch garage door opener and a reasonably high quality garage door. This was, sadly, small comfort in view of the fact that the door was stuck open, and it was around 8 p.m.

The first problem -- the obvious problem -- was that a guide cable jumped its pulley. The second problem -- the small problem that had been irritating me for weeks -- was that the spring wasn't tight enough, so that the motor was having to take too much of the door's weight. (The primary symptom of the second problem was that the door would refuse to open, usually right when I needed to get to work.)

Investigating those problems revealed a series of secondary issues:

The track was mounted too close to the frame of the garage, causing the door to rub against the jamb and the frame on one side.
Support brackets for the track were installed backward.
The release handle that allows manual opening and closing of the garage was installed backward.
The pins in the outer hinges of the door were installed such that they could catch the guide cable and either stop the door from moving or pop the cable off its pulley.
The pulley was loose.
There was too much give in the door, causing it to shimmy too far left and right, potentially destabilizing the pulley further.

On the plus side, the repairman seemed highly skilled, and, as the owner of a small, local company, heavily invested in making a good impression. He made sure that I understood what he was doing and why he was doing it, and went above and beyond to make sure that the fix was complete. (If you know anyone in the area who needs garage door maintenance, installation, or repairs, let me know. I'll give you his card.)

On the minus side, I didn't exactly budget for this. I wonder if I could make winter holiday presents from the clay in my back yard...

Dragging furniture around

2009-11-09T17:04:00.001-08:00

Because replacing a faucet and engaging in a futile, yet exhausting, effort to dig a hole in the back yard weren't enough, I also spent some time moving furniture this weekend. Now that all of the books that I'm not going to give away are in book cases, I have reconsidered the need for a guest room. I don't exactly have hoards of potential houseguests lined up on the front walk, but it is nice -- inviting, even -- to have a place where guests could sleep.

This meant moving the computer and its accoutrements out to the room formerly known as the library (a.k.a. family room). I think it was acquiring a rug for the room last weekend that helped me make up my mind: something about seeing the rug on the floor made me think that that the room would make a good study.

So now my computer has a new home, closer to the source of the DSL. And I rearranged the bookcases and filing cabinet in the former office to make room for a bed.

Now all I need to do is buy a couch, and then my futon can become the guest bed. (It has a pretty decent memory-foam mattress.)

Of course, buying a couch requires money, and I have other things to spend money on first. Like trimming the giant tree in the front yard before it drops branches on my roof. Or like fixing a garage door that stuck in the up position when I came home from work last week. Or property taxes.

But, hey -- at least I know what all my rooms are for now, right?

Digging a hole

2009-11-08T18:26:00.000-08:00

There's a wee patch of scraggly grass between my patio and the east fence that's about three feet wide and maybe 8 feet long. It would be a lovely place to plant a decorative border of some sort. It gets plenty of sun. It gets some runoff from my neighbor's yard, which reduces how much water I have to do. I see it whenever I look out the kitchen window.

As I have tried to dig up the patch of scraggly grass, I have discovered some things:

Scraggly grass forms mats, which are somewhat difficult to unearth.
Something has spread a dense weaving of woody roots just under the grass layer.
Several trees have spread thick roots into that corner of my yard.
The dirt is only about 8 inches thick.
Under the dirt is a rock-hard layer of clay and rock.
The reason there's a quarry less than a mile away is that there are lots and lots of rocks around here.

So far, using a pickaxe, a shovel, and a small pruning saw, I have dug a hole about 8 inches deep, 2 feet wide, and 3 feet long. I have uprooted a large quantity of scraggly grass and an equally large quantity of small, woody roots. I have sawn through 3 substantial roots (the largest about 3" in diameter). And I have inhaled possibly my weight in dust.

This is fun?

An aside

2009-11-07T17:21:00.001-08:00

As I was typing that last post, I heard my neighbors out on the porch. The man was calling for his wife to look at something, and then both of them started swearing. (I almost never hear my neighbors swearing, as they have 2 young children.)

One of them then said, "It's a black widow!"

The other one said no, but, "That one is!"

Net result: at least 2 dead spiders next door. And I think I'll be extra careful when working along that fence for a while.

Back to work

2009-11-07T17:01:00.001-08:00

Life conspired for a while to keep me from getting much done on the house, but I'm back to work. First up: replacing the faucet in the bathroom sink.

Before I moved in, we almost completely redid the main bathroom in the house. My dad and I took out the old vanity, cabinet, light fixtures, and miscellaneous hardware. The flooring contractors replaced the ratty white carpet (!?!) in the bathroom with tile and laid in a new toilet base. My dad and I hooked up the new toilet, and then my parents worked together to put in a new vanity, medicine cabinet, and shelving unit. I don't remember which of us put up the towel racks. The only thing we didn't replace was the tub and its surround. (We did put in a new showerhead and tub faucets.)

Imagine my dismay when, 3 months into living at the house, the brushed nickel coating on one faucet handle started to bubble. By the time I pried the faucet off this morning, the cold water handle was basically chalk, and the hot water handle was starting to show signs of corrosion.

That will teach me to buy the cheapest bathroom sink faucet that I could find. (In my defense, it was on sale: I didn't know it would have been the cheapest faucet in the store even without the sale.)

The replacement is a mid-grade Price-Pfister faucet with some nice touches, like a high arch on the spigot that makes it easier for tall people to wash their hands (or fill a bucket, or whatever), and a bit of elegant detail on the handles.

It was touch and go there at the start. Sinus problems were one of the things that had been keeping me from getting much work done around the house. Although I no longer have dizzy spells whenever my head changes altitude or direction, and I don't have the sense that I'm coming down with the plague, the room does still spin when I lie flat on my back, such as, say, when I'm lying under a sink, trying to disconnect some plumbing hardware.

That was exciting.

Once I got the faucet installed, it took about half an hour for the nausea to go away. Once I was pretty sure I wasn't going to lose breakfast, I went out and dug holes in my yard for a while to clear my head. Then I finished hooking up hardware.

So now I have a fully-functional sink again. No leaks so far! Hopefully I won't have to do this again for quite a while. (It will take a while to recover: there's the residual dizziness from lying under the sink for so long. Plus the cut on my thumb from when my hand slipped as I was tightening the plunger thing that controls the drain plug. And then there's the aching in my hands and wrists from loosening bolts and nuts that my dad had tightened, and from attempting to tighten blots and nuts almost as tightly as my dad would have tightened them.

Good times. (C., if you're reading this: that one's for you.)

And that was just the start: there was the aforementioned hole digging (and root sawing, and weed pulling), plus the furniture rearranging! So stay tuned.

Fleas

2009-10-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Now that I've made it to the acceptance phase with my property tax bill, would you like to hear about my plague of fleas?

(As an aside: how inviting is my house, anyway? Don't you want to come to the epicenter of the plague of moths, the plague of spiders, and now the plague of fleas? Come enjoy the abundance of bugs and the dearth of furniture!)

So I left my house and came home with fleas. (That will teach me to go anywhere.) My best guess is that I sat in a flea-infested seat, and came home with several tiny visitors. The location of my first plethora of flea bites supports this theory.

It took a while for the bites to appear, so my unwanted visitors has plenty of time to establish a foothold. By the time I started obsessively washing everything I owned, it was too late. I took to removing socks and shoes and rolling my pants up above my knees whenever I came home; at least that way, I had a fighting chance to see the fleas on my before they could a) bite and b) crawl their way up into my clothes to find better feeding grounds.

I did a fair amount of research, and gathered a fair amount of anecdata, and came to the conclusion that nobody has a clue about the best way to get rid of fleas. There are lots of things that work for some people, some of the time, but nothing seems to work for everybody all of the time.

I took the flea powder approach. This stuff is highly toxic. The label warns that one should avoid having it come in contact, directly or indirectly, with humans or animals. How one is supposed to spread the powder over one's entire house, pushing it down into every millimeter of carpet, without coming into contact with said power, I do not know. I did my best: I wore a mask, I showered and then left the house for 9 hours immediately after I finished. But the stuff was all over me.

I didn't die.

Some of the fleas did. There was a marked downturn in flea-related activity after the initial treatment. (Also, I learned an important lesson: if you have a hybrid vacuum, use it in bagged mode to vacuum up flea powder. Otherwise you will ruin the extremely expensive bagless-mode HEPA filter, and possibly cuss a lot.)

To make the vanquishing stick, I followed up with what seems to be a popular folk remedy: I spread 20 Mule Team Borax all over the place, and let it sit for a couple of days. Actually, for a day and a half: after that, the borax was having bad effects on my breathing, so I vacuumed it up.

And then I vacuumed every day. The whole house. And taped the vacuum bag shut, and wrapped it in plastic, and dumped it in the bin outside.

Once, I skipped a day and the fleas were back.

It has now been 8 days since I've seen a flea or been bitten.

I went 36 hours without vacuuming and didn't see a flea.

Now, I'm going to try 48 hours.

Perhaps, soon, I can go a week between vacuuming sessions, so my neighbors can stop wondering whether I've developed OCD, and go back to worrying about my social life.

Seriously?!?

2009-10-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's been almost a month. Sorry.

The phone thing turned out fine. The phone technician said it looked like someone accidentally pinched a cable while working on something else in the wiring box.

Anyway, I've been distracted by a plague of fleas. But more about that later.

What has me posting today is my property tax bill. My very first property tax bill. Sent, for reasons unknown, to my last address.

As an aside, I can't figure this out. I bought a house. I specified on pages and pages of documents that I was buying the house as my primary residence. So far the company that provides my homeowner's insurance, the lender that got me my mortgage, the city assessor's office, and now the treasurer's office can't quite put together MY PRIMARY RESIDENCE with the place that I live. This has me troubled. (I even had to write a letter explaining why the city had two addresses for me. I did not live in my house until I owned my house, at which time I started living in it. Is this really so unusual?) It took the junk magazines that fill my mailbox roughly 2 weeks to figure out that I had moved and chase me to my new address. If they--people who want me to give them relatively small sums of money--know where I live, why can't the people who want me to give them large sums of money figure out where I live?

At any rate, after taking its circuitous route through USPS forwarding, my property tax bill arrived. Charmingly, the first payment is just a few dollars more than all the money I have saved in the past 5 months. And 3 months after the first payment, I get to pay that much money again.

Now, I knew that I would have to pay property taxes. I even had a rough (though, as it turns out, slightly low) idea of what my property taxes might be. But I never sat down and thought, "Gosh, paying property taxes is like paying 2 extra mortgage payments a year, except without the making a dent in what I owe."

So as I made a giant pizza this evening (and I sure hope it freezes well, because it's going to take me a month to eat this thing), I would occasionally go to the table, pick up the bill and look at it again. The amount doesn't change. Neither does my incredulity.

No Dial Tone

2009-09-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

Today, I discovered another joy of home ownership. I picked up the phone to make a call, and no dialtone. Only now, because I'm a homeowner, if there's a problem with the phone line, it's not the landlord's problem; it's my problem!

Interestingly enough, my DSL is working enough to let me post this blog entry (though the connection does keep cutting out), even though I have no phone service.

Hooray for technology!

My AT&T service appointment options? Saturday between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. (way to narrow down the window there, folks) or Saturday between noon and 4 p.m. I picked the one that didn't leave me shackled to my house for 12 hours.

We'll see how many minutes before the technician arrives my dial tone comes back. This is an extra fun game, because if everything is working when the technician arrives, I get to pay a $55 fee. Yay! If there is a problem, but it's inside my house, I not only get to pay that fee, but the technician will tell me the super-secret current hourly rate for service, so that I can decide if I want the problem fixed.

This game just keeps getting better and better.

Dream, Dream, Dream

2009-09-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

Good news: I went furniture shopping the other weekend, and finally found some pieces that I liked.

Bad news: I came to the uncomfortable realization that I can't afford to buy furniture right now.

Much of the reason that I haven't been writing is that not much has been happening. I'm still slowly rebuilding my savings after buying the house, and most of the things that I want to do cost money that I don't have.

I did borrow some tools from my folks last weekend to start tearing up my back yard. My plan is to do some experimental digging and poking about to find what I have under the baked dirt and assorted weeds in the parts of my yard that aren't trees, bushes, or roses. I know I have some chunks of concrete. Raking leaves on Wednesday, I discovered that I also have a lot more gravel than I'd thought. (It's the small, reddish kind, so it blends in pretty well with the baked dirt until you start moving it around with a rake.) Initial excavations in a corner of the yard uncovered large and gnarly roots. There may be a fair number of those. In addition to my own bushes, trees and roses, my neighbors trees and bushes clearly have spread their roots far. My yard has the enterprising volunteers to prove it.

Three of those volunteers are lovely sapling ash trees that will take out my back and side fences if I let them grow. Although it pains me, I have been slowly removing them, one yard waste bin full of young branches at a time. So much for trees of mystical portant in my backyard.

I'm still trying to identify the fourth volunteer, which I'm inclined to let grow. It's not in a bad place, and the trees of its type around the community look nice and (importantly) not too big.

Eventually I'd like to put in a couple of fruit trees (I'm thinking avocado and peach) and start filling in with flowers and edibles. It would be nice to start getting rid of the grass. (Have I mentioned yet today that I'm allergic to grass? Every kind of grass I have? Especially the kinds that I have to keep mowing all the time?) Nice to have something to replace the weeds with, too (other than bare dirt).

Soon.

Took a Bit of Break

2009-08-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

First I went up to San Francisco, then I went out to St. Louis, then my sinuses went all wonky, and now it's 100 degrees outside.

I know: excuses, excuses.

I do get powerfully lazy when it's 100 degrees outside. Something to do with having no air conditioning. I can listen to my neighbors' air conditioners, though, and imagine that they're cooling down my house. (It doesn't actually help much. Or at all.)

Fortunately, I have ceiling fans in two parts of the house, and a little oscillating fan that's making it bearable to be working at the computer right now. That's kept me from having to run off to a nice, air-conditioned hotel for a few days.

Meanwhile, not much is going on around the house. I have mostly conquered a plague of moths that threatened to overtake my kitchen. This involved a lot of squashing of moths, and a lot of throwing away of open packages of things that might possibly have moth larvae in them. At any rate, I'm squashing a moth or two an evening these days, rather than 20 or more at a time.

Makes you want to come and visit, eh?

So I probably shouldn't mention the plague of teeny tiny baby spiders that assaulted the lap over my bed the other night. Dozens of itsy bitsy spiders aren't all that much better than a really big spider. The problem is, you never know if you've gotten them all. (Speaking of really big spiders, there's one that's staked out a territory between a couple of bushes in the back yard. I know, because I walked through her web. Fortunately, she ran for the trees, rather than for my hair.)

I'll stop with the creepy-crawly anecdotes for now. Tomorrow, there's furniture shopping on the agenda. Wish me luck.

Isn't Technology Wonderful?

2009-07-12T19:51:00.001-07:00

While I was writing that last post, my irrigation system was watering the yard without any human intervention. Given that I still can't find the instruction manual for the irrigation system, I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Now, my yard will be watered on a regular schedule, whether I remember about it or not, and it's all nicely programmed to fit within the limits of the city's water restrictions.

Best of all, I no longer have to run to turn off the system after zones 1-3 have been watered, because a tip from a friend has let me turn off zones 4 and 5. (Those are the drip systems set up from plants that no longer exist.)

Ancient History

2009-07-12T19:11:00.001-07:00

Having finally remembered that I possess a large quantity of Ethernet cable, I now have an Internet connection in my office, at the low, low cost of an aesthetically displeasing trip hazard that runs the length of the hallway and through the middle of the bedroom.

Having a fully functional computer in the office has sent me on a trip down memory lane, as I have been perusing archival images of my home. I can now share with you the fully glory of the peeling white and green kitchen sink.

This is the sink that has given me a love beyond words for the cheap, stainless steel sink that has since replaced it. Oh, the joy of being able to do the dishes in my very own sink.

But the sink was not the only piece of original 70s, urm, design work left in the home. After tearing out the old carpets, I found that one bedroom and the dining room still had their original flooring.

One of these days, I'll have a full set of pictures to show you what this all looks like now. In the mean time, here's a preview, from just before I moved in. This is the back corner of the master bedroom, which I am currently contemplating turning into a reading nook. If you look carefully, you can make out the one functional phone jack in the whole entire house.

Things I Have Not Been Blogging About

2009-07-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

For the 4th of July, I got my yard some plants. Having tossed the little plastic pots they came it, I can't tell you what kind they are exactly, but one of them is a succulent, one of them is a tall, purply grass, and 3 of them are flowers. All were intended for the half-barrel planter in the back yard, but they didn't all fit. So now the small planter on the patio has a cluster of tiny pink flowers between the oregano and the basil.

The male half of the couple in the house to the west of me is using up some vacation time, which means that I am going to get a new gate on that side of the house! In addition to working on his own home remodel, he plans both to make the fence between our houses a little more weather resistant, and to put in the gate. (How cool is that I have neighbors who bought new gates for the neighbors on both sides when they put in a new fence?)

I still don't have closet doors. I've been trying, but I had a very discouraging Home Despot experience. I have found various other local purveyors of doors appropriate for oddly-sized closets, and hope to find some time to get some pricing soon.

Because my closet is no longer the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, however, the closet door issue has somewhat less urgency. I rearranged my bedroom over the weekend, and now have a large empty area to fill. (This is in the interest of giving myself options; I am increasingly inclined to turn my office into a guest bedroom, and am exploring various places to put my desk. Current favorite: the library. Which works as long as I can create a comfy reading nook in my bedroom.)

I have come up with a way to make my necessary future bathroom remodel more expensive and painful: turn the faux master bathroom into a true master bathroom. This involves moving a bit of wall.

The rose bush that I pruned way back when I moved in has come back with a vengeance. It is now covered with beautiful blooms, and has a couple of stalks shooting up taller than the ones I cut off.

All is not well in rose bush land, however, because something is eating my rose leaves. I am going to try to identify the pest this weekend. Hopefully its total annihilation will follow.

I am thinking of starting a compost pile.

Oh! I now have pictures on my walls. The decorating is far from complete, but it's coming along. I finally got a lovely but oddly-sized print matted to a standard frame size, and it now commands the place of honor over the dining room table. My dining room walls are medium green. My dining room chairs are upholstered in royal blue. I had not considered the latter fact when implementing the former. But the print magically makes it work with its vibrant blues and greens! Isn't it nice when a total accident makes it look like you had a plan all along?

Also, I am continuing to shop for furniture. More accurately, I am spending too much time wandering around furniture stores wondering why other people's taste is so different from my own, and how anyone can afford to pay that much for an overstuffed armchair that looks likely to cause lasting back pain.

Needful Things

2009-06-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have never much cared for mowing the lawn. For one thing, I'm allergic to grass. Bermuda grass, Kentucky bluegrass, crab grass: if there's an allergy test for it, I'm allergic to it. For another thing, it's sweaty, uncomfortable work with minimal reward. You put in an afternoon chopping the tops off grass, and then the grass grows back.

When I moved into my house, my dad was kind enough to give me his old lawn mower. He made sure it started before he put it in the van, he filled up the tank, and he gave me the gas can, besides. Last weekend, guilt about the non-dead clumps of grass going to seed in my yard inspired me to attempt to start the mower. The attempt failed. My dad came over to help with some plumbing work mid-week (I had a leaky bathtub faucet); he was likewise unable to start the mower.

So now I own an electric mower. The kind with the cord. (I still hope to have my house furnished sometime this century, so the battery-powered mowers were out of my price range.)

The cord is an interesting thing. I managed not to run over it, but I did tangle it in not one but three rose bushes. (I have the puncture wounds to prove it.) I also discovered while untangling power cord from rosebushes that in spite of the safety features of the mower, it is possible for the mower it start itself, should the power cord get wrapped just so around the handle, and should one give the cord a tug as one is disentangling. That was exciting.

Mowing a yard that is half dirt is another interesting thing. I believe that I inhaled a few gallons of topsoil in the half-hour or so that the mowing required.

A third interesting thing is how quickly the grass bag can fill up in the process of mowing a tiny yard that is mostly dirt. Where did the grass come from? The crabgrass lies mostly flat, so I don't know how much of it the blades could have gotten, and the clumps of taller grass gone to seed are few and far between. And, I say again, the yard is small. So how did my yard waste recycling bin get full to the brim with cut grass?

At any rate, the job is done (at least for the next week or two or however long it takes me to feel guilty again). My yard doesn't look particularly better than it did before. Nor shorter. But my neighbors saw me mowing the thing, and I have a can full of grassy bits to recycle, so I suppose I accomplished something.

Not Quite As Old As the House, But...

2009-06-21T21:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to post about recently, because my right knee has been on strike. Apparently all of the bending and lifting and kneeling and squatting and twisting and leaning has not been much appreciated by my muscles and joints, and my right knee decided to tell me so. Although I haven't exactly been sitting in bed munching bon-bons, I have also much scaled back my home improvement efforts. For the most part.

Yesterday I did try to mow the lawn (but couldn't get the lawnmower to start). I took the weed whacker to some edges. I dug out a few weeds. I trimmed back a few bushes.

Most importantly, I identified the very large tree in my front yard as an ornamental pear, and the three saplings in the corner of my backyard as very young ash trees.

The ornamental pear will stay. The ash trees will have to come out before they get big enough to take out the back and side fences.

I still have one mystery sapling. If you know what kind of tree has smooth, gold-colored bark (similar in color and texture to an Asian pear) with long, almost rectangular leaves, give me a call. I have to find out what it is, and how big it's likely to get, so that I can figure out if it stays or if it goes.

Today, I tried to make a new screen for my bedroom window. All I have to say about that is that aluminum is a stupid thing to make into a mesh, and I still don't have a screen for my bedroom window. What I do have is a big sheet of aluminum mesh with lots of holes in it.

Stupid mesh. (Okay, so apparently being in pain and being thwarted in my home ventilation efforts make me 2 years old again. I'm okay with that.)

No Such Thing

2009-06-07T20:38:00.001-07:00

There's no such thing as a "small project." At least, not around here. I keep trying, though.

It seems like every time I so much as pick up a broom, time warps, and I look up an hour later, covered in dirt and drenched in sweat with the sweeping still to do. Today, for example, cleaning the bathroom turned in to washing the windows, scrubbing an oven rack, cleaning the kitchen sink, stuffing piles of cardboard into the recycling bin, and water. That's after sweeping the garage turned into deadheading the roses, weeding the back yard, tearing out the dead ivy, and chopping pruned limbs into disposable pieces.

I am making progress: I'm down to one box in the bedroom, one box in the meditation room, one and a half boxes in the living room, a bunch of books in the family room, and assorted detritus left to unpack and/or put away. Also, although I have a few of the smaller pictures and assorted bits of arts and crafts hung, all of the big pieces have yet to go up. I'm still making sure the rooms are laid out properly.

There are some bigger projects left to do (doors for the bedroom closet; a phone line in the office), but I keep getting sidetracked on the smaller ones. It's all about what's bugging me most at the moment I decide to work on something.

Don't Need Hobbies; Have House

2009-06-02T19:51:00.001-07:00

Today I came home from work and dug out a 3+ foot section of root (roughly 1.5 inches in diameter) from along the edge of the garage. A number of daffodils were sacrificed to this cause.

The flower bed along the garage has about 4 inches of topsoil (feels like potting soil + random dirt) over rock-hard red clay and chalky pebbles. I now understand why the roots think that my foundation might be a reasonable place to grow. Fortunately, I had a pickaxe (thanks, Dad) and some ingenuity. The main root was lying flush against the foundation, which made it hard to get a grip on. But once I dug out enough to get the claw end of my hammer under the root, I was able to pull it out just far enough to wedge the pickaxe under. Hooray for leverage! I leaned; the root broke off; I declared victory.

In addition to the main stretch of root, I dug out a number of offshoots, some of which were rather sizeable themselves (as in, longer than a foot, and too thick for my hand-held shears to cut through). One of those shoots was doing its level best to work its way between the stucco and the frame of the garage. I had to chop several bits of it off before I was able to work it free of the wall. It was wedged in there but good.

A fair amount of digging out remains to be done, but I'm feeling like progress was made (sore fingers, aching back, and all).

Lessons learned:

A hammer is a useful gardening tool.
If I am going to be working in the dirt, I should always put on my gloves. Always. Even if there aren't any thorny things around. My fingers will thank me.
It's all about the leverage.

Little Things

2009-06-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

As of tonight, I have a working fan in the bathroom. For the past several days, I had an open tunnel to a vent in the roof, with the result that the front of my house smells like wood smoke. I am very hopeful that with the fan and its flappers in place, the smoky smell will fade and vanish. In getting to the point of replacing the fan, I have learned that:

The vast majority of bathroom fans for sale at large hardware stores (Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace, True Value, Dixieline) are side venting, meaning that they blow air out the sides. This is very handy if the fan is mounted next to a horizontal vent.
Some fans made to vent to 7" vertical ducting are 8" wide. This is fine if you have an 8" opening to mount them in.
Apparently, 6.5" vertical fans are a thing of the past.
When remounting a 6" vertical fan to use the appropriate bracket for your ducting, be careful not to bolt it on too tight. If you do, the fan won't be able to spin without a little help, and you will drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why it works when you poke it, but won't start on its own. (You bolted it on too tight. Mystery solved.)

I am now at the stage of many small steps. There are a great many useful things for me to do around here, and several of them are self-renewing. There are so many things to do, however, that writing them down overwhelms me. So I am doing a bit at a time. The oven, for example, is now mostly clean (though I wouldn't recommend looking in the broiler), and one oven rack is mostly clean. That was good enough to make some delicious roasted new potatoes. They are delicious with dinner, and also make a fabulous home fry or hashbrown alternative with breakfast.

Adding, Not Subtracting

2009-05-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

I am discovering a funny thing. As it turns out, adding new responsibilities doesn't do anything to eliminate the old responsibilities.

Tonight I went to the gym and then did the grocery shopping. And that's why I still need to screw on 3 vent covers, call 2 contractors and AT&T, buy a decent broom and sweep the patio, finish unpacking, put together some window screens, and figure out what to do about the missing closet doors in the bedroom.

But hey -- at least this way I can cook myself a decent meal. If I ever get around to it.

Walking Around

2009-05-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, after work, I went for a walk around my neighborhood.

It appears that lot of us are trying to figure out how to avoid watering a lawn.

I saw a great many ex-lawns: bare dirt with piles of dead grass heaped in a corner, bare dirt with gaping holes where trees or bushes used to live, bare dirt baked hard with a light scattering of yellow weeds. I also saw lawns in the process of being demolished: a strip of bare dirt being gradually widened by a guy with a shovel, a pile of rocks and black plastic hanging out on a driveway next to a yellowed law. And I saw a few yards that had finished the lawn removal process and moved on to become low-water landscaping: short stubby palms and succulents in little islands of dirt surrounded by a sea of wood chips, white and red gravel arranged into a swirl pattern, sand-colored rocks surrounding a single palm tree, hard dirt covered by an orchard of small trees in individual pots.

It also appears that having a small terrier is a requirement for living on the street directly up from me. I thought I might identify which house has the little yappy dog that wakes me up 3 or 4 times some nights with its endless barking. Sadly, when there is an entire row of houses with identical looking dogs yapping at me as I walk down the street, it is very difficult to identify the one that is left out all night. I guess this means that the next time I'm woken up at 2:30 in the morning by a dog that will. not. shut. up., I'll have to walk around the corner to figure out where it's at. Or maybe stand on a ladder in my back yard with a big flashlight...

Switches and Pruning and Blinds, Oh My!

2009-05-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

There are no longer curtains held up by painter's tape in my office. Instead there are blinds, which would lend a suitably professional touch were my equipment, papers, and reference materials out of their boxes and properly arranged. Since there's still no phone line in the office, however, and given that some of the carpet is still not tacked down after the flood, it continues to look rather like a junk room with a desk. And a very nice office chair.

My dad came over today to help put up the blinds. (Only he puts up the blinds, and I measure things, hold things, and hand over tools when prompted.) He also put in a new vanity light for the bathroom and rewired a light switch that was making suspicious noises. (Turns out someone installed a dimmer switch to control something that doesn't dim. It didn't look at all like a dimmer switch.) Then we went to work on the yard.

There is still a rather large flock of dandelions, but the aloe vera plant is no longer being strangled by the surrounding shrubbery, the weeds along the east fence have been cut back, and the mounds of dry leaves (a.k.a. perfect tinder) have been raked up and gathered for disposal. Hooray for free yard waste recycling.

Yesterday, I spent a chunk of time cleaning in anticipation of a visit from some friends. The result is looking very home-like. This is progress.

Flock of Dandelions

2009-05-24T20:46:00.001-07:00

What have I been doing this weekend? Uprooting dandelions, for the most part. At least, that's what it seems like. You wouldn't know it by looking at my yard, though. Sadly, there is still substantial uprooting to go.

I did get one rosebush pruned. (I'll wait until winter for the other two. One of them continues to bloom like crazy, and the other has some promising buds.)

As I was pulling dry, woody stalks out of the planter box on the patio, it became evident that I was removing the remains of an herb garden. The aromas were lovely. I uncovered just a bit of still-living oregano, to which I've added a clump of basil. It's supermarket basil, purchased on a whim; it's looking rather defeated. I may have to just eat it, and start over from seeds.

I also ripped out a fair amount of dead brush and ivy.

But it's still a jungle out there.

I also cleaned the house as best I could. The bathrooms and kitchen are in pretty good shape (if you don't look in the oven), and the carpet is vacuumed (at least the bits where the boxes have been cleared off).

This evening, I've been tormenting myself by pricing furniture online. The bottom line: if I like it, I can't afford it. Hooray for the money pit.

Tilling the Fields

2009-05-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

After work yesterday, I went to the library and checked out some gardening books. One is a basic primer, and two are more specific to caring for Southern California flora. While numerous indoor tasks await (not the least of which is unpacking), I'm looking forward to spending some of my Memorial Day weekend out in the yard. My neighbors, no doubt, are likewise looking forward to me spending some time in my yard.

So what about my yard?

In the front, the yard is encased on 3 sides by a short retaining wall of concrete bricks. The short retaining wall results in a fairly level yard, which I appreciate, given the precipitous slope of the driveway. At the east and west front corners of the lawn, evergreen shrubs, roughly manicured into triangles, serve as boundary markers. Roughly centered on the lawn is a large shade tree, grown rather wild and unruly in the absence of care.

Along the edges of the front walk, and under the front window, additional short retaining walls enclose raised flower beds. I have positively identified the daffodils planted in the beds; the other flowers remain a mystery to me. A series of fledgling bushes may very well be seedling versions of the huge tree in the yard, and need to be uprooted before they undermine the foundation of the house.

One of my tasks will be to move the flower beds. Their level of elevation means that water is draining into the foundation, and that's not so great. I want to keep the daffodils and mystery flowers, however, so I hope they'll survive being uprooted and relocated.

Before I get to that, though, I need to pull out the dandelions that are rapidly overtaking the front lawn. Dandelions, it appears, need rather less water than grass, so while the grass is mostly dead, the dandelions are proliferating.

Ultimately, I'd like to take out a bunch of the grass, and put in more succulents and native plants. Not only will this have the benefit of saving water, but it will help my allergies. As it turns out, I'm allergic to just about every kind of grass there is. There are a lot of people thinking along similar lines in my neighborhood (which is not surprising, given ongoing promises of water rationing this summer), so I'm hoping to take some walks this weekend to get inspiration.

And that's just the front yard. I think I'll save the back yard for another day.

New Sink!

2009-05-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

I am still delighted about the sink. Doing the dishes, believe it or not, makes me positively giddy. Plus, I've cleaned and scrubbed and disinfected the kitchen counters enough that I now feel able to actually cook. I've eaten dinner at home twice in a row now, and gone 2 entire days without eating out at all. Does this new fondness for doing dishes and cooking represent a shift in paradigm? Only time will tell.

The rest of the house continues to come along. I have the science fiction and fantasy paperbacks shelved, and am working through the hardcovers and graphic novels. I am geek; hear me roar. I still haven't figured out where I'm going to put the rest of my books (a miscellaneous hodgepodge of English-language, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French fiction and non-fiction), but I need to uncover the dictionaries as soon as possible. (I've found the Webster's Unabridged for English, but I'm woefully unprepared should a translation project come my way.)

The phone lines are my next big challenge. I hope to talk to the phone company tomorrow, so be prepared for a sudden loud shriek of horror and disbelief sometime around mid-morning.

Progress

2009-05-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

There are blinds in the bedroom and middle room now, and towel racks in the bathroom.

There are 3 bookcases up, at least, and bolted to the wall, and I just about have the first one filled with books.

And even though I can't use it yet, do to a few inches of gap between the drain pipe coming down and the drain pipe going into the wall, I have a new sink! Already, the kitchen looks so much better, I don't have words to express it. It looks like a place where I could cook food without dying of food poisoning!

(Sorry about the continued lack of pictures. I haven't talked much about my phone line problems. Suffice it to say that the same person that glued together the pipes in the house and jury-rigged the sink in the garage seems to have had a phone fetish, and there is a tangled mess of phone lines and cables in the walls. This is making it hard to get a good Internet connection at home.)

Lesson learned: a sink made of porcelain over cast iron is very heavy, so you probably shouldn't drop it on your drain pipe.

Flooding

2009-05-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Now that I have had a chance to recover, would you care to hear about how I ended up with flooding on move-in day?

To get there, I have to start with the day the washer and dryer were delivered. The outlet for the dryer vent, as it happens, is located behind the utility sink in the garage. Because the dryer requires a semi-rigid, metal vent pipe, the delivery guys weren't able to hook the pipe up to the outlet. Ultimately, my dad ended up taking out both a portion of the utility sink's jury-rigged support system (a bright green vanity on a plywood support) and a mystery pipe jutting out to nowhere from the sink's drain. The vent pipe was attached securely.

In the process of securing the dryer's vent pipe, however, the washer's drain hose was knocked loose. You see where this is going. Monday morning, I decided to do a load of wash before the movers came, et voila!, flood.

Water streamed out of the garage. Water streamed through the wall of the garage and down the front walk. Water streamed through the front closet and into the entryway. Water streamed under the door and into the hallway. And water streamed through the wall and into the closet of the front bedroom.

Several soaked rags and 24 hours with 4 power blowers and a fan later, dryness was accomplished.

I still, however, need to get the carpet tacked back down.

Calming Down

2009-05-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday evening cleaning my old apartment, and dropped off the keys first thing in the morning. I've been sleeping in my new house for four nights now. I'm getting used to being there, but it still doesn't quite feel like "home."

Getting to this point has been challenging. I feel like I've been subjected to a sleep deprivation experiment. Just about every part of me is bruised, cut, or aching. Some hours, the fatigue makes it very hard to think straight. There are boxes everywhere. The dandelions, dead grass, and plant skeletons in the yard are taunting me.

Still, I'm starting to feel like I'm making progress. And I have been taking pictures. I just have to find some free moments to download and post them.

Moved

2009-05-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

I have moved in.

There are currently 4 high power blowers working on drying out the flooded front of my house.

The curtains in the front room are held up by painter's tape. They're the only window coverings in the house.

The Flooring Is In

2009-05-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

The movers are coming on Monday.

Panic has ensued.

On Tuesday, when I opened the house up for the carpet installers, the morning light coming through the doorway revealed all manner of holidays in the paint over the opening leading to the dining room.

But dealing with that has to compete with getting a fully functional bathroom together before Monday. The holes are patched, and I just bought the primer and paint. Now I have to tape, prime, and paint; finish assembling and connecting the toilet; install the vanity and medicine cabinet; and put up the towel racks, toilet paper holder, shower curtain rod, and shower curtain. Adding a little over-toilet storage would be a nice bonus, but not likely to happen before move-in.

Other than that, I still need to cut a path from the dryer to the vent hole, get the locks rekeyed (a call is in to the locksmith), and put up curtains. I also need to figure out what I'm doing about bookcases (keeping the open-faced white ones or getting myself to Ikea for 3 more with doors to match the 2 in my apartment's dining room).

Oh, yeah. And pack.

Back to Work

2009-05-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

After a lovely weekend of rest and recharging, I'm back at work.

Among other things, I'm currently trying to figure out what to do about the sink and counter tops. It appears that the original laminate counters were goldenrod, to coordinate with an avocado green sink. At some point, the counters and the sink were painted white. The counters are now stained and chipped, but I could live with them. The sink, however, is in bad shape. The white paint has peeled and chipped, and the resulting mess is both unsightly and unsanitary. On top of that, the faucet is corroding and the drain covers look to be rusting.

At first, the obvious solution seemed to be to replace the sink and live with the counters until I was ready to remodel the kitchen. (The cabinets look to be aged walnut veneer; the flooring is made up of individual vinyl adhesive tiles.)

The problem is that my primary consultant (I usually call him Dad) is convinced that taking the sink out is going to crack the counter top, since they may be both glued and painted together.

So I'm waiting for a bid on replacing the counters (new laminate, for the time being; I still want to remodel down the road).

Meanwhile, the carpet goes in tomorrow, and I still have a bathroom to paint and finish. (When I'm not busy packing. And boy, do I need to get busy packing. I hope to move next Tuesday.)

One Step Forward...

2009-05-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

As happy as I am about my lovely new laminate flooring, I am heartily wishing that the installer had been a little more careful about the finishing work. I found out the hard way that there are blobs of adhesive, roughly the size of a large jawbreaker, lying about on the exposed concrete portions of the floor. By "the hard way," I mean that I stepped in a blob without realizing it, and tracked adhesive all over my nice new floors.

It has taken a fair amount of elbow crease and some cussing to get it off.

I hope that I have found and disposed of all of the remaining free-range adhesive blobs, but I'm not certain.

This and the amount of paint touch up work that I've put in this morning (without finishing the job) has worn the shine off my optimism. But I'm off for a couple of days of rest before coming back for the final move-in push, and I hope to have plenty of shiny hope back by Monday.

Little Steps

2009-04-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

The laminate flooring is in. A very competent young man is putting in grout around the fireplace and finishing the corners this morning. It looks every bit as fabulous as I could have hoped. The color is warm and cheerful, and works very well with the dark walls in the family room and master bedroom.

Also, while I was waiting for the installer this morning, I nudged around in my blocked kitchen drain and managed to clear it--at least enough to let the standing water drain. I'm still going to need to run a cleaner through the pipe, I think, but it's a relief to having the standing water gone.

I know there's still a fair amount of work to do before I can move in and really make this house my home, but I'm feeling pretty good this morning. I love it when a plan comes together.

How Could I Forget?

2009-04-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

My house has an irrigation system. And it works! I successfully watered my lawn for 7 whole minutes this evening--likely the first time it's been watered at all since the previous owner entered foreclosure.

So I can keep the lawn green, right up until I dig it out and replace it with succulents and rocks.

Bumpy Road

2009-04-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

My family room and bedroom floors now look like they contain half-dried mud puddles, but I guess that means my floors are even now. Tomorrow, the laminate goes in.

I also have bright and shiny new appliances. The refrigerator and washer went in without difficulty, but the dryer ran into a problem. Have I mentioned the utility sink in the garage? Because I have one. It's mounted inside a green vanity that's mounted on top of a plywood block. It's entirely kludged together, but very handy for washing paintbrushes and paint buckets. If only it didn't block access to the vent hole for the dryer. After some consultation with my dad, the consensus is that an l-joint for the drier vent isn't going to work; we're going to have to cut a hole in the vanity to get more clearance. So I guess I won't be doing laundry in my own home tomorrow.

The washer and dryer are very shiny and modern-looking, with all kinds of buttons and dials and little chiming sounds. Too bad they almost block access to the house from the garage. Ah, well. At least it's only almost.

While I was waiting for the appliance delivery, I did get to repaint the bedroom with the mismatched color problem. This should prevent problems with future guests trying tactfully to ask me if the streaky effect was intentional. So all non-bathrooms are now well and truly painted.

Now I just have to figure out what to do about the bathrooms.

Well, the Tile Looks Good

2009-04-27T18:46:00.001-07:00

It has been an interesting day in home ownership.

The day started off on a bit of a downer, when I realized that the touchup paint in one of the small bedrooms fails to match the base color. So I'll be getting up early to repaint that room tomorrow.

Then the tile guy showed up right on time, but discovered that the shutoff valve for the toilet wasn't working. Fortunately, I had a spare shutoff valve on hand, and managed to get it installed (with a little help from the tile guy to tighten it appropriately). As of 4:45 this afternoon, the tile in the bathroom looks great (pictures coming soon).

The laminate team didn't show up until after I'd headed off to work. This afternoon, when they called me to come lock up after them, they ominously said that there was a problem with the floor, and that the boss would have to talk to me tomorrow. Never good. When I got to the house, I could see that they'd done quite a bit of prep work: my formerly glue-encrusted floors were polished concrete. Sadly, it's uneven polished concrete. So I get to look forward to finding out how to address badly uneven floors. (My dad has suggested switching from laminate to tile. I'll see what the other options are in the morning.)

When I showed up at the house, the one functional toilet in the house was running. I managed to kludge the float into triggering shutoff, but it looks like once I finish repainting in the morning, I may be reinstalling toilet bits. Whee?

Here's hoping that the appliance deliveries go smoothly tomorrow, and that they happen at the beginning of the delivery window so that I don't miss too much more work. Being employed is what's letting me afford all of this, after all.

Marathon Weekend

2009-04-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

Well, it was close, but it looks like I survived. I'm bruised and scraped and covered in paint, and I have aches on top of aches, but all the rooms are painted, and the floors start going in tomorrow.

On top of marathon painting, this weekend included ripping out a vanity, cleaning mountains (or at least two large garbage bags) of ash out of the fireplace, replacing a leaky shut-off valve for a bathroom sink, capping an unneeded line off the sink valve, getting the covers back on the various light fixtures, and replacing the faucet part of the laundry hook-ups.

The best part of the weekend was the continued evidence that my father's love for me is boundless. He took Friday off from work and stuck with me straight through Sunday evening. His expertise and hard work were wonderful, of course, but having someone there for the hiccups is beyond price. (For example: when you realize that the computerized paint tinting system failed to actually tint a couple of your gallons of paint the same color, and that as a result you have a very odd look going on in the hallway. Or when you realize that the reason the bedroom door didn't shut right wasn't the crummy doorknob after all, but the fact that the catch was a quarter-inch too high.)

I should be scrubbing face plates for outlets and light switches so that I can have everything in place for the rooms that the flooring folks will be working in tomorrow, but the pain pills haven't kicked in yet, and my back won't tolerate it. Doing laundry and grocery shopping last night after a day of working on the house just about killed me. Fortunately, sleep has been a marvelous healer for me.

For any of you out there preparing to do some interior painting in your own home, I'd like to close with a tip: 1" angled trim brush. If you, like me, don't have much experience with painting, this is a miracle tool. It keeps the paint off the ceiling, allows for a good line around doors, and gets into corners that an amateur doesn't have a prayer of reaching with a standard 4" paintbrush (or even a standard 3" trim brush). It does slow you down when you're cutting in a room, but to me, the more professional-looking result is worth it.

Bonus tip: a little watercolor paintbrush is great too, for those tiny spots in awkward places that even the 1" brush struggles with. I, for instance, have one place where 2 doors are about an inch apart, and I was trying to get a strip of color between them without leaving any obvious holidays or marking up the white trim. Then I found a wee paintbrush from a watercolor kit and gave it a shot -- et voila! C'est magnifique.

What Common Sense?

2009-04-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

This evening, after leaving work some time after 5, I finished painting the trim in the family room, primed the edges of what is to be the light wall of the living room, and in a fit of misguided optimism, primed the wall that will sit directly behind the washer and dryer. Problem number 1: I shouldn't have been priming anything as the evening light was failing. Problem number 2: I'm really not sure how best to prime around the water pipes and drain pipes and random cords and everything else in that corner of the garage. Problem number 3: I had to postpone appliance delivery until Tuesday, so there wasn't really all that much hurry in the first place.

We'll see what it looks like in the morning.

On a positive note, the tile crew and laminate crew are due to start putting in flooring on Monday.

Not Improving

2009-04-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I learned that birthday cake is delicious, even when it isn't my own. (Okay, maybe I knew that already.)

Today I learned that chair massages are fantastic, but that the relaxation doesn't last very long if the things that were stressing you out in the first place are still around.

To do this week:

Clean and paint the corner that will be home to the washer and dryer
Swap out the washer fixtures for some that are less corroded
Cap the water line leading to the refrigerator so that I can turn the water back on in the kitchen
Get the vanity out of the bathroom so that the tile installers can come and do their work
Finish painting the family room and master bedroom so that the laminate installers can come and do their work
Finish painting the rest of the house so that the carpet installers can come and do their work
Get ready for all the pesky packing and moving that I need to do

Energy Star

2009-04-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Today, I have learned that I am not naturally talented when it comes to painting trim. Whether fortunately or not, I will have many opportunities to develop this skill.

But that's not the exciting thing about today. The exciting thing is that I bought appliances! More specifically, I bought a washer and dryer and refrigerator. Because Earth Day is this week, and because the washer and refrigerator are Energy Star compliant, I got a 10% discount on them at the Home Depot. I also got an extra $25 rebate from the power company. For the washer (and the toilet I bought yesterday), I could have gotten a rebate from the SoCal Water$mart program, too, but they've run out of rebates for the month of April. But at least I will be limiting my water use and being as environmentally conscious as my budget will allow me to be.

One last bit of excitement for the day: I set the trash out this evening. Oh, the joys of curbside trash pickup. I didn't have quite enough recycling to make it worth setting out the recycling bin this time, but I'm looking forward to trying it next week. (One takes one's pleasures where one finds them.)

Color!

2009-04-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

Today was a lot better than yesterday. With so much of the painful prep work out of the way, my dad and I were able to focus on painting. The kitchen is now done.

Nearly done are:

The dining room (just needs touch-up)
The family room (needs baseboards painted)

The master bedroom (needs baseboards and closet shelves painted

The living room is also well underway, though the scary texture on 2 of the walls is making things a bit difficult. It also doesn't help that the new shade, when wet, is pretty close to an exact match of the old shade. Still, one more coat on the 2 brown walls, and primer for the sandy, off-white wall and we're nearly there.

Progress is being made.

New Levels of Pain

2009-04-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spent the morning buying paint, and then working with my dad and sister to get ready to start painting. Then we ate lunch. And then the fun really started.

The short version is, we primed the walls in the minty-to-limey green master bedroom and in the army-green-over-sunshine-yellow third bedroom. We (mostly my dad) put the first layer of neither-limey-nor-minty green up in the kitchen, and I put the first coat on the living room.

Last night, my level of fatigue and pain was approaching, if not at, a record high. I can bend my fingers this morning, but gripping is difficult. I'm considering whether I have any slip-on shoes I don't mind splattering with paint, because I'm not sure I can tie the laces of painting shoes.

I have learned that:

Good paint is expensive.
I know nothing about painting.
My natural painting skills are few to nonexistent.
Cutting in is harder than it looks.
Even when I am deeply underwater at work, and the load shows no sign of trailing off, I can look forward to going into the office on Monday to get a little rest.

Ouch.

2009-04-17T19:32:00.000-07:00

Today, the old carpet was taken out. Interestingly enough, it is only now that the carpet is gone that my nose has become aware that a cat lived in the house. I had previously had suspicions, given the number of short, very fine, black hairs that kept getting in the way as I scrubbed the walls. But the Glade plug-in that the seller's real estate agent put in the family room was strong enough that the only thing I could smell, even days after throwing the thing away, was vaguely chemical-laden, way-too-sweet vanilla.

Removing the carpet took away a lot of the fake vanilla. And in the master bedroom, it revealled cat. I'm thinking that the paint and new flooring will take away the odor. Plus, tomorrow my dad's shop vac will take away the spilled cat food and miscellaneous unidentified particulates littering the floor. Yay.

Today has been a banner day. I stripped all the hand-strippable contact paper out of the kitchen, finished removing screws and nails from the walls, took down the left-behind window treatments and shelves, spackled the heck out of everything, cleaned the ceiling fans (did I mention that I have dining room and master bedroom ceiling fans?), vaccumed the walls to get rid of cobwebs, washed the walls and baseboards, washed the doors, cleaned years of accumulated greasy spills off the outer sides of the oven, cleaned under the oven, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, and decided on paint colors. (My wrists, back, and knees are killing me, and I continue to cough occasionally from the carpet-ripping-up dust.)

Paint colors! I went back to the paint store and used the failed colors to help me choose two new greens and a brown to try. Success! Both greens were very nice, but rather than going with a slightly brown-tinged sage, I'm going with a lovely green-grey color with a hint of blue. That will be for the dining room accent wall, and for the entire family room/library. The brown for the living room is similar to what the previous owner used, but a tad darker and with just the barest hint of additional warmth. Both colors go fantastically with the carpet.

So tomorrow my dad is coming down to help me get started. Wish us luck!

Guacamole Does Not Belong on Walls

2009-04-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, picking colors from sample cards is not my superpower. In fact, of the three colors that I bought samples of today, I like exactly 1 of them. I'm going to let them dry overnight, and see how I feel about them in the morning, but at the moment, I'm feeling dismayed. The mid-range slate blue in the bedroom looks pretty good. That, however, only makes the grocery-store guacamole green in the dining room and the strangely orange looking brown in the living room seem even worse.

I wasn't going for a wall full of guacamole. I was hoping for a sort of mid-range sage green. Something cool and calm, but also somewhat reminiscent of a library.

I wasn't going for orange in the living room, either. I wanted a slightly warm brown, something that would tie in subtly with the art I plan to hang in the room, and add a little brightness over the somewhat muted shade of carpet I picked.

Did I mention carpet? Because I spent almost $7000 at the flooring store today. Tomorrow, a crew comes to rip out the existing carpet. First part of next week, I get tile in the bathroom. I don't know what tile. It's a surprise, because I'm getting it free. I can veto what shows up if I hate it, but otherwise, I get what I'm given. Did I mention that it's replacing carpet? In the bathroom? Because it is. I don't want to tempt fate here, but I think it would be hard to be worse than carpet. In the bathroom.

Once I've finished the painting, I get the laminate in the bedroom and family room and unoffensive brown carpet everywhere else. (I wanted something very neutral that would be hard to stain. We'll see once it's down what I actually got.)

And once I have flooring, I can start moving my stuff in. This is getting exciting!

It's Official: I Have Cows

2009-04-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

The sale was recorded this morning. I am officially a homeowner. I have really and truly signed up for up to 30 years of debt and a whole lot of maintenance.

I went by the house after going to the gym this evening, and a couple of my neighbors were out and about. They're very friendly. One of them gave me 2 garden hoses (for the front and back yards) and helped me figure out the water shut off valves (turns out, I did know how to shut off water to the house, but I hadn't given the pipes enough time to drain). I think I'll like living around these folks. And I'm looking forward to meeting the dogs next door.

This Is the Closing that Never Ends

2009-04-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

It just goes on and on, my friends. Currently, it's due to be recorded first thing in the morning. We'll see.

I did spend some time spackling and cleaning walls today. In the process of so doing, I learned that half the kitchen sink is clogged. Later, I learned that every time I turn on the kitchen faucet, I send water to through the tube intended to connect to a refrigerator water/ice dispenser. Oops. Too bad there's no refrigerator. And no clear way to shut off water to the tube without shutting off water to the sink.

A while back, the refrigerator in my apartment, which had an automatic ice maker, broke. The replacement refrigerator didn't have an automatic ice maker. My delivery guys were gone before the kitchen had flooded enough for me to realize that I had some disconnected tubing. So I thought I could crawl under the sink here at the apartment to figure out what to do in the house.

Yeah, no.

I'm planning to replace the sink and faucet and all that in the near future at any rate. I'm thinking I can maybe just use the water in the bathroom until then?

My cows, they are requiring care.

Hurry Up and Wait

2009-04-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

My loan is fully funded, but we still haven't closed. It turns out there were 2 more pieces of paper for the seller to sign. I've been told that we're likely to close first thing in the morning. That would be nice, given that I already have the keys. (That was necessary because no one else wanted to have to let the power company rep in to turn on the gas in the morning. My appointment time is between 8 and 12. We'll see how many holes I can spackle before the rep shows up.)

Tomorrow evening, I'm hoping to pick up some paint samples so that I can see how my color choices hold up to the light of morning, day, evening, and night. I'm going with an earthy pallet of browns, greens, and slate blues. If all goes will, pictures will be coming soon.

One small task that I'll need to get done before I paint is taking down the crosses over all of the doorways. I hope that the previous tenant left them as a blessing, and not as a warning that the neighborhood is full of vampires.

One Beginning

2009-04-12T17:17:00.000-07:00

My offer for the house I'm currently buying (let's call it Cowherd) was accepted just as I was due to enter escrow on another property (let's call it Nearmiss). Both properties were foreclosures held by the same bank, but Nearmiss had been vacated so recently that the previous owners' belongings were still there. That was the first problem with Nearmiss: the clear and unmistakable fact that the previous occupants hadn't be ready to leave, and might not have even believed that they would be forced to leave. They left behind items of both financial and sentimental value.

I had initially seen hope in Nearmiss because of its light and its fruit trees. The house was small, but had good light from lots of windows. As time went on, though, and it felt more and more wrong to me. I'm used to living in a moderately sized apartment, but the place felt small. There was no room where I felt I could spread out. I took a handful of friends and family members out to look at the house and get their opinions, and their positive impression kept me going for a while. But the more time I spent there, witnessing the remains of someone else's misfortune, the less I felt that I could be at home in that space. I developed a serious case of cold feet.

Had my offer on Cowherd not been accepted, I don't know what I would have done. I might have backed out anyway, and spent however many weeks or months it took to find another house to offer on. Or I might have made myself go through with it, and been working on getting it livable right now.

I'm just as happy never to know.

Getting Ready to Rumble

2009-04-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Given that I have a couple of extra days before I assume the mantle of homeowner, I've spent the morning peparing to accumulate burdens. I have acquired packing tape and gloves, spackle and TSP, and a large list of pending purchases.

After pricing the options, I'm planning to go with a combination of carpet (in a mellow brown called, undescriptively, number 508) and laminate (Lamipro, in a warm medium shade called Jatoba). As a bonus, I may be getting actual tile in the middle bathroom—it's small enough that vinyl entails large amounts of wasted material. My vendor, who happens to be the father of a friend, is trying to acquire tile for me in such a way as to incur no additional cost to me.

After a long wander around my friendly neighborhood Home Despot, I think I have found a washer (front loading, even) and dryer, and a refrigerator. I had been planning to get a fridge with a bottom freezer, but I found a top freezer model that is not only cheaper, but also more energy efficient than the bottom freezer models that I can afford. (Side-by-side is not an option for me at this point.)

I need to remeasure before I pick out a sink, but I have a feel for pricing. And I need to decide whether I'm putting in 0, 1, or 2 new toilets.

But I'm ready to spend a productive Tuesday morning prepping walls while I wait for the gas company rep to come turn on the gas. That is, if I close on Monday.

Fingers crossed.

Denied!

2009-04-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

It looks like there will be no closing today.

- Was it the lack of middle initial on my loan documents? No.

- Was it a problem with the wire transfer of my down payment? No.

- Was it missing information of any sort from me or any member of my team? No.

It's the seller. Apparently, after being rather menacing about what would happen if I didn't meet the close date, the bank that shall not be named (at least until after closing) couldn't be bothered to complete its paperwork.

Typical, really. But I'll tell the story of the long and torturous path to escrow another day.

Lessons: Part I

2009-04-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

In my march toward closing, I have learned that:

An unmarried woman is not the same thing as a single woman, and the difference is vitally important and could delay closing.
First Name Last Name is not the same as First Name Middle Initial Last Name is not the same as First Name Middle Name Last Name, and using the wrong one could delay closing.
Having FedEx delivery confirmation and the signature of a person working for the title company does not mean that anyone who needs the papers in the envelope has received them, or is looking for them.
Even though I have never bought a house before, a great many people will assume that I know exactly what I'm doing, and will therefore not tell me what I need to do until after I needed to have done it. It is therefore an excellent idea to ask every single person I talk to what my next step is, and when it has to be done. If they give a date range, have it done by the first day in the range.

Possession

2009-04-09T20:25:00.001-07:00

As soon as tomorrow, I may be a homeowner for the first time. The journey to this point has been strange and convoluted, and the real adventure hasn't even started yet.

I hope to use this blog to document the process of making a place my home, and to think about holding possessions—including what's likely to be the largest purchase of my life—without becoming possessed.