house – Page 5 – linsenbardt.net

September 25, 2018September 25, 2018

The Saga Continues

So, as mentioned in the previous post, we had a bit of rain coming through and had to protect the porch as best as we could. We hung some tarps from the roof line because it wasn’t supposed to be all that windy and it was more likely that any moisture that did get onto the floor would evaporate faster than it would if we just laid tarps out on top. For the most part this held true, though the mailman had to walk up onto the porch and tracked wet foot prints, so it wasn’t a perfect solution. Still, it was better than the alternative.

Eventually, after a few days, the sun returned and we were able to get to work on painting. We put two coats of primer on and two top coats on the floor, as well as one coat of primer and one coat of a more “cream” color on the columns and previously-white portions of the porch.

Unfortunately, toward the end of the primer coat on the columns, we noticed something going on down in the foundation…

Brooke noticed it first. Some of the rocks and mortar from the supports had fallen out overnight. This happened after we’d been on the porch with our initial priming work, so we’d been on there quite a bit, but never felt any shifting. However, clearly something happened.

Even the floorboards had separated a bit, so now pine between the boards was exposed and, obviously, wasn’t primed against moisture. The floor had dropped ~4 inches, so it had also separated some from underneath the siding.

Needless to say, this wasn’t good. We called the construction folks and had them come out the next morning. They looked it over and decided the supports had to be replaced. As we couldn’t prove that this was necessarily their fault (and, honestly, we can’t know that for sure…it could just have been a coincidence, but seriously, we were not wanting to spend more than we already had!), we were going to have to shell out more to have them lift the porch and replace the supports with fresh cinder blocks. And this was going to take more time, which meant that we couldn’t paint anything because it could move again!

So, they came that same afternoon to remove the supports and replace them with temporary wooden ones while they poured concrete bases for the new blocks to go on. This part was done the afternoon we first contacted them.

Then, another guy was supposed to come do the masonry work…but he was engaged in another job elsewhere, so it took four days for him to finally come and take care of it!

By the time it was done (on a Saturday morning…the weekend we took the kids to Columbia to be out of our hair while we finished this…), the blocks looked good and everything was solid. It just took substantially longer than I wanted to get done!

Granted, you can’t make plans around construction, because “things happen.” Still…I don’t have to like it…

Once the blocks were in place, we could finish the painting of the floorboards and trim, and also do all the landscaping we had planned. Brooke picked up boxwood bushes, blue rug juniper, and sky pencil holly to go in the front from our local landscaping place, and we also had 100 cu. ft. of mulch dropped off. (Side note: apparently 100 cu. ft. of mulch isn’t enough, so get 150 next time!) We struggled to find landscaping pavers we really liked, as multiple places in town didn’t have anything in “grey” and we didn’t really want to drive down to Sedalia, but thankfully we lucked into some for $1 each at Wal-mart, so that worked just fine!

We put those in and did our best to secure them, though we didn’t use a shovel to dig a ditch for them like we probably should. I’m hoping that they’ll settle out over the winter months and be fine for next year, otherwise I’ll knock them over while mowing…

The landscaping was mostly done by Saturday, but we had to wait until Sunday morning for the construction folks to remove the supports and drop the floor for us to finish painting and put the lattices back up. Brooke also spent a substantial amount of time with a small paintbrush filling in the gaps in the floorboards to limit the water that could cause damage. While she finished that up, I grilled some awesome steaks out back… 🙂

The next day after church, we put the railings back on, as well as the lattices. The lattices went on alright, though they don’t fit quite as well as they did with the new supports.

That part wasn’t so shocking, but the railings proved more difficult than we’d expected. Apparently the columns weren’t put back in exactly the right places, so we ended up having to saw them down a bit to make them fit appropriately. I also had to run out and grab a few more brackets that would fit the railings better (because the ones we bought fit some railings, but not all railings…ug…). Still, they’re a bit wobbly as they’ve always been, but they’re far more secure than they were before!

Finished product! Those pencil holly should grow up to ~6 ft high, so we’ll have to trim them, but they’ll drive people toward the center of the stairs. The plan is to remove that center railing once we get some time. It’s falling apart and a coat of paint isn’t going to fix it. We also switched around the furniture relative to where they used to be because we realized during the course of work on the lattices that the western side of the porch is actually longer than the eastern side, so it makes more sense to have the couch and chairs/table switched.

Lastly, because we were waiting for paint to dry, Brooke took it upon herself to finally, ultimately, gut the yucca plants.

Seriously, she’s been waiting for years to get rid of them. When the bees were here, the yuccas provided some useful shelter in the winter, but without bees, we don’t need them! They’re gone!

That’s it! It took a lot longer, and a lot more money, than we’d originally hoped, but I suppose that’s to be expected with home improvement projects. We’re happy with the finished product, at least!

July 27, 2018

Garden Update: Late-July

The garden has slowed down to a degree, mostly because rain has been very scarce. I’ve watered as best I can, of course, but there’s only so much a sprinkler can do. The temperatures this week have been great: the A/C has been off for a week and will remain that way into next week!

The green beans are “done,” it seems. You can see in the picture above, but the middle of the crop just died off all the sudden and we aren’t sure why. Regardless, Brooke canned 28 pints of beans, plus another 2 pints that didn’t seal correctly, and the 3+ quart-size bags we’ve given away to others. Brooke has also canned cucumbers as lime pickles and ended up with 7 pints of those, but the cucumbers are still coming so she’ll end up with more.

The tomatoes have taken off and have tons of green ones on, but we have relatively few that have actually ripened. And by “relatively few,” I mean “two.” We’ve stolen a few from the Gault’s next door, as it always seems like theirs ripen a month before ours do. I’m not sure what black magic their casting, but whatever it is, it works.

The soup beans are also vining out substantially, though the ones furthest from the trees are doing better. I’m sure it’s the excess sunlight they get over there, but still, worth noting.

The berries aren’t doing much right now. The Japanese Beetle War of 2018 spilled over to them for a little while, but I’m not sure they actually did much damage. We did lose all the peaches except for four that I picked early. After the beetles were done last week (seriously, it took a month this year…), there were still 3 or 4 peaches out there, but when we looked this week, we couldn’t find them. We suspect the neighbors stole them…grrrrrr…

The pole beans have some nice looking pods on them, so we think we’ll be able to pick some soon!

The peppers keep truckin’ along. We’ve got Margaret Peppers coming off the plants, as they’re starting to turn red. They’re bell-type peppers, but they’ve got an ever-so-slight “kick” to them that Meg doesn’t seem to mind. The other plants are mostly hot peppers of the Coyame variety (I think…they at least look a lot like those from last year…)

Last but not least, we added to the walkway over the past few weeks! Meg and Calvin helped a little bit, but weren’t as interested this year in concrete work. I think I ended up getting something like 20 or 25 bags (80 lb) of concrete mix to finish this up, though I’ve got a few extra I didn’t use. The intent is to put a few patio chairs out there and move the chiminea onto the platform, but I’m waiting a few more days for the concrete to harden more fully. I put sand and pea gravel on today, but I still need to get some more to fill in the gaps a bit better.

We’re happy with it, but may need to add a few more segments depending on which chairs we end up settling on. We’ll probably landscape around the patio a bit, but as it’s so shaded there, we need to be careful what, exactly, we plant nearby. Brooke has a large pot she picked up to get something started for next year already, so that’ll make an appearance once she gets some time.

Ultimately, we want some nice old metal chairs, or something similar, but they’re ridiculously expensive and you kinda need to run into them at antique malls, so we’ll get something for the meantime and keep our eyes open for “just the right chairs” to go there. It may be a bit before we find exactly what we want.

Also, in the space between the patio and the tomato garden plot, we’re going to put in a raised bed and a make-shift greenhouse for some lettuce. We want to get that going in the next few weeks so we have time to plant lettuce for the Fall, and perhaps a few other things. I think Brooke’s going to plant some herbs there, too, but we’ll need to wait until next Spring for those. We’ll see what she picks, I suppose!

July 2, 2018July 1, 2018

Garden Update: Early July

The garden mostly took off while we were on vacation. We had some weeds to clear out, mostly from the pepper and tomato plots, but we have everything generally back up to spec after a week. The corn has gotten taller, though no tassels have appeared. I feel like they’re doing better than last year, but that’s probably because we planted them late last time around. There were flowers on the green beans when we left and they turned into full-fledged beans in that period of time.

Brooke’s canned 9 pints so far and we’ve eaten on and given away others. As usual, we can just toss green bean seeds into dirt and grow a ridiculous crop. You can’t not grow green beans, folks…

The tomatoes have been tied up and flowers are showing up all over. There aren’t all that many actual tomatoes on yet, but we’ve seen some tiny ones on there, and some romas that are getting within striking distance. The plants are looking healthy, but rain has been sparse, so we’re having to water them quite a bit.

The peppers are similar. We’ve actually got multiple bell peppers that are nearly ready to pick, as well as some hot peppers (no idea what they are…some assortment Brooke planted) that are nearing full size, and on those plants, we’ve also got more on the way. In the picture below, you can see the remnants of the lettuce in the background that’s getting taken over by weeds, so I need to flip it all over in the next few days. Brooke’s thinking she’ll plant some more spinach and eventually some lettuce for the Fall crop. One step at a time…

The pole beans and sweet potatoes are still truckin’ along. The raspberries are still coming on a few at a time, and we had Sam’s cat sitter eat on them while we were on vacation, so I think she probably got the bulk of them.

The trees are another story. The peaches are looking really, really good, but the Japanese beetles are terrorizing near everything else. They’re really hitting the apple trees, cherry tree and almond tree and we’ve been waging war as best we can. Brooke’s got two traps up and emptied one already, and I’ve been spraying the trees with an organic pesticide that shouldn’t affect bees or other pollinators. Hopefully this ends quickly, but until then, it’s a headache (as it was last year…).

Lastly, Brooke spent some time watering the front porch plants today and pulled down a hanging fern only to find some stowaways. 🙂

June 13, 2018June 13, 2018

Garden Update: Mid-June

As we’re heading off on vacation soon, I figured I should put up an update on the garden, so if the Squirrel Apocalypse takes them, we remember what all our crops looked like…

Overall, everything appears to be coming up pretty well and some of the plants (notably the green beans, tomatoes and peppers) have some flowers on them. The cucumbers are starting to vine out a bit, so by the time we get back from the Grand Canyon, I expect them to have taken over the yard… The green beans look great as always. I’m pretty sure we could plant those in sand and rocks and still have them grow, as we always seem to have good luck with them (despite my hard work at killing them off…). The corn keeps on trucking, albeit inconsistently.

Again, the tomatoes are starting to get some buds on them, so hopefully we’ll grow some sooner than usual. We aren’t focusing on soup beans much this year (we still have some from last year and we always end up with more than we need), so they’re just planted in two of the corners of this plot. Most of the tomatoes should end up being “paste tomatoes,” though we’ve got some “slicer” varieties planted, too. Hopefully we won’t end up with any weird varieties, but we had to transplant a few “volunteers” from last year’s plot to fill some holes of plants that didn’t make it. We’ll see!

The green peppers have finally taken off in the past week. We got some rain (1.5″) earlier this week and I’ve been watering them , so they’re looking better. The lettuce is doing shockingly well still, but we expect it’ll be done by the time we get back. We ended up getting quite a bit of lettuce this year and I think Brooke’s going to plant another round when it starts to get toward the end of the season. She comes home from work and grabs a few leaves for her sandwich every day. Like ya do. 🙂

This plot is still kinda a mess, now that the mint has almost fully taken over… There’s lemon balm in there still, as well as a random orange flower that came back from last year that I can’t identify (and/or remember). There are a few other flowers in the northern portion of the plot, but they’re already dying off. A volunteer sunflower from two years ago has popped up recently, too…

Raspberries, sweet potatoes and “pole beans”

We’ve got raspberries! Not a ton, but we ate a few last night and there are still some on now. The pole beans are vining appropriately and the sweet potatoes are truckin’ along.

And the trees. Still lots of apples and lots of peaches, but still no cherries or pears. We didn’t expect almonds, though we did see some flowers on there over a month ago. The peaches are looking especially good, so I hope they make it!

That’s it for now! The harvest will be plentiful, as usual…as long as the squirrels leave it all alone…

May 28, 2018May 26, 2018

A Memorial Day Weekend Project

The bushes in front of the house have been there since, likely, the 1950s. It’s hard to know for sure, but considering how “full” those things were, it had to be for decades.

They weren’t particularly good looking and housed wasps and ground bees from time to time, so we’d talked about removing them for the past few years. The floorboards on the porch have gotten worse this year and needed replacement, so we were prompted to move up our timetable a bit on removal of the bushes.

We haven’t had much time this Spring so far, so Memorial Day weekend was the best option to try and get some of the work done. Last weekend in Columbia, I picked up a new reciprocating saw and some blades; we picked up some new clippers for Brooke for her birthday; and we borrowed my Dad’s chainsaw.

We went at them with the clippers first and then employed the reciprocating saw to go closer to the stumps of the bushes. There were two bushes in the front on each side that we were trying to remove, as well as one pine tree on each side. The spirea bushes were also overgrown, but we wanted to keep them and our local landscaping company, Springwater, recommended trimming them back substantially and letting them grown out again. Springwater also gave us some other landscaping ideas that we’ll employ as the Summer progresses.

The first two bushes went down relatively quickly and we had the next two trimmed down before lunchtime, so we made good progress before the temperature increased, though the sun got intense as the afternoon went on.

We took some breaks, of course. The kids were in the backyard with the pool up and various water toys, so they were entertained while the grown ups did actual work on their Memorial Day weekend…

I ended up using Dad’s chainsaw on the stumps and was able to flatten them out a bit to make it easier to cover them up. The stumps proved a lot stronger than we’d anticipated and the chainsaw proved useful, but not enough to complete the job. I hacked at the last stump as best I could but may need to let it rot a bit first before I can take an axe or something to it.

The wood under the porch floor seems to be pretty well intact, so we don’t think we’ll have to gut the whole thing and should just be able to replace the floorboards. Obviously, that could change (because we’ve never done anything like that before…), but we’re hopeful that it should be a relatively easy project.

We’re going to wait until after vacation before we kick that one off, though!

May 9, 2018May 15, 2018

Garden Update: Early May

Well, the garden’s finally planted. In some ways, I feel like it’s later than usual, but in other ways, I feel like it’s early (probably because we planted popcorn in, like, July last year…).

The tomatoes are in the rightmost plot this time and green beans and popcorn are in the leftmost, largest plot. New for this year, Brooke put in some cucumbers. The kids actually eat sliced cucumber sometimes, so perhaps we’ll get something useful…

Brooke planted radishes, carrots, spinach and lettuce about a month ago now, but there was a massive rain (~4″ in a few hours…), so the seeds she’d just put in the ground shifted out of their rows and/or didn’t come up. Honestly, they look a little better than we expected, but we need to water the garden and get some grass clippings put in to limit weed proliferation. Last week was the first time I mowed the lawn (fully, at least), so I’m only now getting to the point where I’m mowing regularly.

The “herb garden” section still needs a little more work, though. Brooke put some bulbs in last Fall and they came up looking all pretty-like. Some of the other perennials have returned, but we’ve added some milkweed and indigo from the Botany class on campus. Again, lots of landscaping to finish off.

The trees have also had their flowers on already. Like last year, the peach tree had a bunch of flowers (and they didn’t freeze this time…yay!), but new for this year, the apple trees, cherry tree and almond tree also had some blooms. We’ll have to see if anything comes of it, especially on the apple trees where the buds were on the smallest of branches…

That’s it for now! We’ve got some radishes ready and the lettuce is moving right along, so onward, summer!

May 5, 2018

R.I.Bees

Brooke had been meaning to get into the hives for the past month or so, but the weather simply wouldn’t cooperate this Spring. March and April had very few warm-ish days and they were typically followed by long rain sessions. Then, if we actually had some good weather on a weekend, we’d be out of town and still unavailable.

Eventually, after Girl’s Weekend, Brooke was able to leave work early and open up the hives and see how the bees were doing. We’d noticed that there wasn’t much bee activity coming out of the hives on the warm-ish days, but again, as weather was back-and-forth for awhile, we couldn’t be sure whether there was a problem or whether the bees simply didn’t know what was going on with the weather situation.

Unfortunately, there were no bees. Our original hive from 2016 was completely empty and was likely “robbed” by another hive of bees. There was still some honey in the 2017 hive, but no bees to speak of, so they likely took their queen and swarmed sometime earlier in the year. The food Brooke put in late in Winter was still there, so it’s likely they left sometime shortly after she was last in the hive.

In many ways, we count ourselves lucky, as many beekeepers lose 1/3 of their hives in a given year and we didn’t lose any last year, so we were probably due to have something like this happen. We’re going to “re-set” the hive boxes to be lifted up a bit before putting any more bees in there, so in some ways, it’s a good opportunity to take stock of how we’ve been managing them and correct a few things before any new bees take up residence.

Thankfully, we’ve still got a decent amount of honey available to get us through the next few months. We think we may be able to score an extra package of bees from Brooke’s Dad in the next few weeks, depending on how his bees hold up. It’s the right time of year for bees to be delivered, so we’re hopeful that if Mark doesn’t end up having extra, someone else will, and Brooke has enough contacts now that we can probably get something going.

Here’s hoping!

March 11, 2018

Garden Update: Early March

It’s been a long time coming. This Winter was quite a bit colder and, more recently, wetter than last Winter, so while we’ve wanted to get out in the garden to get things started, our schedule and the weather simply haven’t worked out.

Case in point, I was on Spring Break this past week and for the first 3 days of it, the temperatures were below 40 F and were rainy and gross. Granted, I was on Break and wasn’t particularly motivated to do anything, but oh well…that’s my excuse.

Regardless, Brooke ordered some seeds and tomato plants from Jung Seed, so we needed to get the ground usable prior to their arrival.

For the last few years, we’ve kept the leftover stalks and grass clippings on the gardens for the season. Last year, Brooke burned it all and we opted to do the same thing this year (this time with a permit, so a bit more legal…). It was just windy enough to feed the fire, but just damp enough so that it would take a little time to burn it all away.

After the fires were done, I used the neighbor’s tiller to turn it all over and make it look all pretty like.

I’m still impressed by how dark the dirt is after using it the past few years. We haven’t had to add much compost, though we did add some manure last year (just a sprinkling, really…not much).

The garden plots are going to get rotated again, but I’ll post more about that once we actually plant some stuff. For now, the plan is to put the carrots, radishes and lettuce are going to go where the tomatoes and peppers were last year. We’re planting all that stuff a week or two later than last year, but whatcha gonna do?

January 2, 2017

The “Half-New” Play Room

After setting up the new shared bedroom for Meg and Calvin, it was time to do something with Meg’s old room. However, after putting a week into that new bedroom, I wasn’t really in the mood to scrape even more wallpaper, so it was decided that the second room would be turned into a play room. In the interest of maintaining our sanity over this Christmas Break, we decided to leave the carpet and wallpaper for now and consolidate all of the toys into that room.

We now have another TV set up for the first time since living here and we have a Fire TV Stick on order to make it a little “smarter.” The only station it gets over bunny ears right now is PBS, but we can live with that. We’ve also got the Lego table set up in front of one of the windows.

Brooke had a crazy idea about the wall that will improve over time. As the kids draw more pictures and do more “art” at school, it’ll get clothespinned to the string she put up for all to see. The easel is also near two new tables we picked up from IKEA to replace the two we previously had, only this time, we put some chalkboard contact paper on it.

“Look, Mom! We can write on the table and erase it again!”

Honestly, I’m not quite sure how the contact paper will last on the tables, as they’re also intended for Play-doh and other things. The idea was that roads and towns could be drawn on it for Legos, cars, etc. We’ll just have to see how they use them…

The last wall involved a purchase of a 9 cube organizer and some bins so we could put all those toys in a mostly central location. Their Kindle Fires can be charged because of the port behind the shelves, so that’s where they’ll live and not in the bedroom (unless it’s during the day). Hopefully we can foster some better habits that way.

It’s going to be a work-in-progress for awhile, but it’s more organized than before! And now the Music Room downstairs has many fewer toys just lying around because they’re all upstairs! There was also a “culling” of baby toys that the kids otherwise wouldn’t get rid of on their own, so this was a good opportunity for “Winter Cleaning.”

December 27, 2016April 11, 2020

The New Bedroom, Part II

Check out the previous post here…

So, the scraping started on a Tuesday and we were mostly done by that Friday, though we got slowed down by the kids getting released early from school due to weather. That, and we were heading to my parent’s house for Christmas stuff that weekend.

As a brief aside, we were on the road to Columbia for 4.5 hours that Friday due to the weather. That trip should only take an hour. It was great fun. Ug.

Anyway, after we got back from Columbia, we finished patching things up and finished scraping the walls so that, on Monday, I could prime everything and paint on Tuesday. We had to go with 2 coats of primer in most places, including the trim, and went with 3+ coats over the wallpapered section of drywall that was unscrapable. We’re hoping the water-based paint doesn’t cause the paper to bubble up, but considering just how stuck it was to the drywall, we don’t anticipate too much trouble. All the primer was enough to hide the floral designs underneath.

We went with an “off-white” color for the trim so we wouldn’t have to do the doors and windows quite yet…

The trim got a somewhat “off-white” color. Bright white would have been preferred, but at this point, we really didn’t want to take the doors off the hinges or fight with the windows, so we figured this color would at least half-way match the doors/windows while still meshing well with the chosen paint color.

More of a blue-grey for the rest of the walls.

Like we did downstairs in the music room, Brooke went with a color that was approved by the National Historic Register. The picture above still had wet paint, and the lights were off, but you can see the blue-grey hues pretty well. We went with 2 coats of paint for most of the way around and, thankfully, it dried pretty quickly.

While we were doing the painting, Mom and Dad were downstairs assembling the twin-sized bunk beds so we could just carry them up the stairs when we were ready for them. The room couldn’t really fit more than 3 people anyway, so it was a good way to divide and conquer.

Pulling the carpet up went remarkably well…

Once the paint was dry, we pulled up the carpet. Dad and I did this the winter after we moved in on the landing to the top floor, so I drafted him into helping for another round. The hardwood was very much intact, though the color differences between the middle and outside of the room was a bit odd. Again, someday, we’ll re-finish the upstairs but, for now, rugs will have to suffice…

After carrying the bunk beds upstairs, laying down the rugs, and installing the new curtain rods and freshly dyed curtains (repurposed from those that were in the room to begin with, but now a darker navy color), we were all done! We also moved Meg’s vanity (my grandmother’s, but painted last winter) into the room to give them a little bit of storage.

We’ve made it clear to the kids that this is a “sleep room” and not a “play room,” so with the exception of a few stuffed animals, no toys are supposed to be in the room. Clearly, this is easier said than done, but we’re going to try and keep it that way for the time-being. Hopefully that’ll stave off any markers on the walls for a few, er, days…

Meg’s old bed was moved in and new sheets/blankets were added to match the bunk beds. Obviously, the bed color is different, but oh well… It’ll serve as a good guest bed should we need one!

Calvin was at school while we got all this done, so he was pretty excited to lay in his new bed! He had a toddler bed after his 2nd birthday and, while he still fit in it, the twin sized bed is substantially larger! He’s slept in big beds already, but this new spring mattress should be a bit more comfortable.

Meg’s up on the top bunk, as she’s the older kid. Eventually, we can relax for Calvin, but for now, he won’t be sleeping up there. We’re doing our best to keep him off the top bunk unless a grown-up is upstairs to monitor their play time, but again, this is easier said than done…

We’re pretty pleased with what we were able to accomplish in about a week! It certainly went faster than the music room did! And help from Mom and Dad was greatly appreciated!

Now, the play room…eventually…