Garden Edition, Issue 5

These are the lilies that have started to bloom both in and beside the garden. They're quite lovely and HUGE!
We've had a busy week of visitors here at 83 Durant. Also, the garden has been coming right along. Here's a current shot of the whole thing:

Here are some unidentified growths that may be weeds (please advise us!):


Here is one of our "joke radishes" about to be eaten:


The "Early Girl" tomatoes are starting to have tomatoes! Very exciting!

And the hydrangeas are starting to bloom!

We're about to go away for a week, so who knows what state these things will be in upon our return. Fingers crossed for decent weather and no critters!

Electrifying

During the process of spare bedroom demolition (detailed in a previous post), there was one unintended, accidental destruction: we broke the lighting fixture (the overhead light w/ the switch). Today, I was thrilled to have our lovely next-door-neighbor, Lisa, and her daughter Cookie, come over and fix it for us. Lisa is an electrician and just all around lovely person. Cookie (who is in third grade) serves as assistant on Lisa's smaller (at home) jobs. It turns out that we had broken it in two places -- the switch itself and the overhead light were both messed up. (I'm sketchy on the details, so I'm afraid "messed up" is as well as I can explain things.) But they are no longer messed up, and instead, we have light! And safety!

She also mentioned that the electricity in the house was updated by the owners BEFORE the previous owners, so about a dozen years or so ago. She said she thought the wiring actually looked a lot better than most of what she'd seen in houses this age, so that was nice to hear.

We're so so thankful to have such kind & capable neighbors!

A funny thing happened while Lisa was working on the project. She needed to run out to the hardware store in the middle of it (I was pleased that we're not the only ones this happens to), so she went to our local Ace Hardware. While there, buying stuff for the spare bedroom, she ran into Zach, the former resident of that very bedroom. No kidding. We had never met him, but Lisa knew the former owners, including Zach (one of the kids) very well.

Zach asked if we had done anything to the house, and she told him we'd done a lot with the outside. The he asked if we'd done anything to his bedroom, because it was a mess, and because he knew there was a big leak in the room -- one that required a bucket -- that they had spray painted over when they sold the house. He said he thought they should have told us about the leak. He also mentioned that he had punched some holes in the wall, and that he could see outside through them. These things, of course, we have already discovered on our own. But he did mention one thing that we didn't know -- he said that there's asbestos in the attic. This seems a little strange (I thought asbestos was mostly in basement, around pipes and furnaces), but interesting. I wish they had told us about the leak, but, we figured it out soon enough.

All around, it was a very informative day!

Garden Edition, Issue 4

The garden was looking in sorry shape due to the overgrowth of WEEDS while we've been busy with other projects. Today we had some beautiful weather, and it seemed the ideal time to take on the weediness.

Armed with information and color-coded photo provided by astute reader and gardener Jess, we knew this much: yellow are peppers and the red are weeds and the purple are in question, but probably weeds. [If you click on this photo, you'll get a better view of the colored circles that Jess did to help us figure out these plants.]



We made an important discovery about the things Jess circled in purple (see photo above); they are not weeds -- they are RADISHES! This is particularly funny since Jess's partner in crime, Stephan, planted these "joke radishes," as he called them, all over the garden. We are indeed enjoying our joke radishes quite a lot.

So I went to town pulling up all sorts of things. There was a lot of grass, and A LOT of shamrocks and lots of little trees sprouting from acorns that squirrels had hidden in the garden. Check out the bucket o' weeds:


And here is the improved garden:

OK, maybe Carter lounging in the lettuce patch is not an improvement, but at least he's not sitting on the herbs (as he was earlier today). There are still some weeds (especially in the lettuce patch to the lower right), but we've gotten rid of a lot of the nasty ones.

By far the most exciting development today was the discovery of BLUEBERRIES on our blueberry bushes:


We each ate a few that were ripe and they were DELICIOUS! We need to get some netting material fast to keep the birds from discovering and devouring our treat.

Today was also filled with another unexpected treat. We were invited to the birthday party of one of our 9-year old neighbors. The birthday party included a live animal show, complete with a python, hedgehog, alligator, and other sundry creatures. It was all pretty amazing. Oh, and there was ice cream cake too. Pretty awesome. We should go to more 9aery- olds' birthday parties.

Garden Edition, Issue 3

It's shocking what happens to a garden when you go away for just a week!

The lettuce is looking great, and at least one tomato plant (I think it's the "early girl") has flowers:


For the botanically enabled of you reading, what things here appear to be weeds?

As you may have guessed, we really don't know what we're doing, so feel free to give us a clue!

The flowers all around the house are also blooming like mad. Aside from the two pink bushes that were going like crazy before we left, the rest of the rose bushes out front emerged with some quite lovely colors:

And yes, that is a bird bath in our yard!

Here's the clematis, and also a new development: the rose bush by the house that we thought was completely infested with aphids actually managed to create two roses -- they're a lovely yellow color.

Triumphant Return

During our trip south, we acquired a lot of new STUFF for 83 Durant. We're pretty excited about a lot of it. This picture shows the new and improved front room. We've acquired a new tall bookshelf (from my Mom, formerly from my Dad's parents' house), a blue checkered couch (from Gloria, one of Mom's friends) and the piece de resistance, an amazing old desk from my Great Aunt Sis. Check it out:


The desk is older than our house, dating from roughly 1850. Here's what happens when you open the top:

It's chock full of nooks and crannies! We love it.

In the realm of more contemporary purchases, we finally got a carpet to cover the plywood floor in the PINK room. It is not pink, as you can see:


Since we are hoping to change the PINK room's color sometime (when?) we got a carpet that looks OK with it, but that will hopefully go with a new, less PINK color scheme in the near future.

83 Durant Garden Edition, Issue 2

The 83 Durant Garden is coming right along. We've had some great weather for it so far.

Today there was a very exciting development: strawberries! I picked and ate two delicious red shiny strawberries off of our very own plants. The plants are still looking a bit scrawny, but we're hoping they will develop and bear lots more fruit for us.

This tomato plant is coming along -- check out the flowers! And the lettuce is looking great, too!

And then of course, there are the parts of the garden that we love, although we can claim no credit for, namely, the lovely flowers, particularly the clematis and the roses, which are growing like weeds:




83 Durant, the blog, is going on a week-long hiatus so we can visit our families. Upon our return, we look forward to finding:
1) exponential garden development
2) a dry basement (we hope!)
3) a bunch more projects to start and resume

Destruction!

We knew this was coming, but it's still a bit shocking. Yesterday we demolished the spare bedroom.

This picture gives you a good sense of some of the problems:

There are lots of massive holes in the plaster (see white patches on blue area) and the plaster that is there is very soft and broken under the thick coat of shiny blue paint. The ceiling is made up of some very ugly white cardboard tiles; in several spots they are broken and stained, adding to the ugly. That red area is actually paint over wallpaper. Check out the texture:


There is no way to get that shiny paint and wallpaper off without doing further damage to the plaster. Thus, demolition! [Also, it's an opportunity to 1) improve the insulation and 2) see inside our walls, both for curiosity and to see if there are any problems.]

We at 83 Durant are incredibly thankful to our friends, Elizabeth, Ian, and Mike, who gave up their Saturday to break our house with us. It was a long, dirty, and at times dangerous job, and they were awesome! Thank you!

We started with the ceiling, and made our first exciting discovery: someone put the tiles in OVER the old plaster:

This actually works out well. We're going to leave the old plaster and the newer nail boards, and just have the drywall done over that. Less mess. We know (from being in the attic) that there is plenty of insulation above there, and it seems best to let it be.


Red balloons be gone! Also, this picture begins to give you the sense of the DUST we raised. It was really, really, really dusty & dirty.

Here's Ian uncovering the chimney:

It seems, from the circular patch of cement, that there may have been a woodstove in this room long, long ago.


This is the closet after we've removed all the plaster -- those lathes will also go, but we think they look pretty cool.


Another exciting discovery was the true nature of the built-in shelves: they are not original! Here's the pre-demolition situation. On this wall, we have a closet (to the right) and a built-in shelf (to the left):

Once we got through the plaster, we realized there was some rather modern framing around the thing:


Inside the new framing was the original built-in, which is identical to the one directly downstairs from it, in the pink room:


Elizabeth and I went to town on the dry wall behind the area formerly known as the built-in. We will probably put full-width, floor-to-ceiling shelves into this nook:


Here is a scary discovery, though not exactly something we didn't know about already:


It's not a great picture, but what you're seeing in the middle there is our next door neighbor's house. Yup, you can see outside from inside. This is the spot where the fascia boards meet the roof. Someone ripped out the oldwooden gutter and put up new fascia, but for some reason, didn't bring the fascia all the way up to the roof. The gap here, which runs the length of the house, is something our roofers mentioned, and they're going to fix it (hopefully soon). But it's a bit shocking to see it from this side!

Here's an example of some of the completed demolition:

It's roughly the same shot as the first one on this entry. Scary!

Here's a shot of the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. It was easier to deal with because it didn't have any insulation at all, but it did have the plumbing and the electricity, so we had to be a bit more careful. We did manage to blow a fuse by incorrect handling of the lightswitch box, but no one was injured.


We cannot believe the tremendous pile of trash that this project created. Who knew that all this stuff could fit in the room????



Today we have some cleaning to do. Tomorrow we seek out some drywall contractors, and sometime before we schedule them, we need to install insulation. We have some leftover from a previous job, but we'll also need more. It has been a very busy weekend! Thanks again to Mike, Ian, and Elizabeth -- we couldn't have done it without them.