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It’s a good thing I made an effort Friday night on the yard, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten anything done this weekend. The rain was pretty much gone by 11:00 AM yesterday, but by then I had already worn myself out shopping at Costco, the new Ace Hardware at Oxbridge, and Big Lots. This morning it was raining again when I woke up, which was fine with me considering I’m a touch hungover from dinner with David & Ginny last night. Three bottles of wine between us will have that affect on a guy.

Dinner was wonderful. We started the evening with a bottle of Bella Sera Pinot Grigio while Ginny and I prepared the veggies for the grill. The wine was nice and light. Ginny found a technique for cooking corn on the cob in a magazine, so we tried it. It’s a quicker version of the old wrap the ear in foil and grill technique (basically you soak the corn and then use a foil pan on the grill). I’m not sure how well it worked, because I didn’t have any of it. The potatoes, though unevenly cooked, were very good. Again, the cooking method was pretty simple: microwave for 10 minutes (to do the heavy lifting), drizzle with Italian dressing, and put them in a foil pan on the grill. I should have pulled out my grill wok for the potatoes, but I didn’t think about it until it was too late.

With our meal I opened the Shiraz from Rosemont Estate that I picked up at Costco. It was perfect. Nice and fruity, but still dry and weighty. The conversation over the meal was as good as the food.

We sat around the table long after we were done eating and finally opened up a Cabernet Sauvingon that David brought. Of the three wines we had it was the least impressive… thin and insubstantial, though it did compliment the chocolate silk pie I made from a box for desert very nicely (which really isn’t the underhanded comment it sounds like).

Ginny made an awesome little valance type thing for the window in the downstairs bathroom. The fabric pattern is very cool and I’d love to find more of it.

If I could get my hands on a few yards of this stuff I’d get rid of the prepackaged shower curtain and make one from scratch.

David and I also talked through a small home improvement project I have in mind. I love the open cathedral ceiling, but I’d love to have a little more of a loft upstairs, too.

The idea is to pull out the short angled wall that is the left side of the stairs and replace it with a wall that goes as high as the little balcony to the left of the chimney. Then extend the floor across the chimney (where John Coltrane is right now) to the existing balcony and create a larger loft like space. If I use the same sort of guardrail as is already up there I’d still be able to put up a huge piece of art that could be seen from the living room floor. Underneath the loft, on the chimney, I’d put a flat screen tv. I’m going to see if I can find some sort of 3D home remodeling software to render my plan. David and I are pretty confident that we could do the construction ourselves. In the end, the space only ends up being about 24 sq. ft., but I think it would be like a cherry on top of a bannana split.

By 8:00 PM last night, after breaking one shovel and making a trip to Lowe’s for another, I removed the three shrubs to the left of the front porch. I figured that since the temps yesterday were lower than they were supposed to be today, any progress I made last night would give me a leg up on getting through what I intended to this weekend.

This morning I was up, showered, and in the front yard working on the four shrubs to the right of the porch by a quarter of seven. Three came up without too much heartache, the fourth is still in the ground. Whenever I get a helper I’ll see about pulling it out with the truck or I may just have someone grind it down whenever I get the trees near the curb cut down. I loaded the truck with the remains of the bushes and the clippings of a crape myrtle I took my new pruning saw to and made a trip to the landfill.

When I got home I started in on the stepping stones. On the side of the house there were eight or ten hexagonal stones and a another half dozen round ones. In front of the porch and along a path to the mailbox were a bunch of slate stones in various degrees of squareness. I pull them all up and stacked them on the driveway for now. Once the slate was up I dug through the pea gravel to discover that whoever had laid this stuff used regular trash bags as a weed barrier. Ugh. This was by far the most tedious portion of this morning’s work. I raked as much of the pea gravel as I could up on to the driveway and pulled out the plastic bags in pieces. I flattened the area out and put the hex stepping stones down to keep people from having to walk through the dirt.

I’m not positive, but I’m gathering that the white trash method of landscaping relies heavily on pea gravel. Both of the beds where the shrubs had been were full of pea gravel as was the entire area in front of the porch and the area from the driveway to side deck where the shaped stepping stones used to lay. I’m not sure what I can do. I think the best course of action will be to simply dig out the planting beds and replace it with top soil whenever I grade the rest of the yard. I need to find a DIY landscaping forum to see what other options I have. I’m convinced the reason the bushes were so easy to pull up was because of the rock content in the dirt.

My eyes felt like I’d been swimming in the ocean thanks to all the sweat that rolled off my brow. My arms are jelly. I came in about forty minutes ago, stripped my clothes directly into the washing machine, and headed for the shower. The front yard looks a little better because there’s not so much overgrown stuff out there, but it still has a very long way to go. The driveway is a shambles with the piles of stones, dirt, and pea gravel. I think I’m done for the day except for indoor chores like laundry and vacuuming. Oh, and a nap, definitely a nap.

Zzzzzzzz.

I’ve got a rather ambitious plan for the weekend. I really don’t expect to get it all done, but any progress is progress and where my yard is concerned anything will be an improvement.

1. There are at least five shrubs of some ungodly sort occupying various spots around the front of the house. If I accomplish nothing else, my primary mission this weekend will be to rip them all out and send them to the dump.
2. The non-designers who “landscaped” the yard used no fewer than three different styles of stepping stones. Personally, I hate stepping stones, so I’ll take them all up and remove them to the dump with the bushes. Eventually I’d like to put concrete paving bricks down in the driveway, off of which I’ll extend a walkway to the side deck as well as the front door.
3. I need to revisit the pruning I started last weekend. The crape myrtles need a little touch up, and following all my research on Monday I now know THE method and I have a much better idea of what’s possible. Of course, now I see crape myrtles everywhere I go (the ones in Innsbrook are particularly well groomed).
4. If item #1 is completed in full with time enough to spare I’m going to go up to the landfill in Henrico and pick up a load of mulch to cover the areas where the bushes were. On the other hand, I may just wait until the first weekend in September to do the mulching (I’m taking two days off after Labor Day–for a total of five days away from the office–to, er, um, labor about the house and yard).
5. The other item that will more than probably be put off until my working vacation is to remove two trees from the front yard (a juniper sort of thing with an ugly dead spot that is most likely unfixable and some sort of uber-shrubbery-on-steroids type thing that looks like the Amazonian rain forest all by itself). Those two will no doubt require a chainsaw. Once they’re gone I’ll make a couple flower beds where they stood along the curb. Hopefully I can get Mom to come up for a couple of days sometime soon to help me pick and plant flowers in the mulched beds. Yeah, I know I should probably wait to mulch until after the beds are planted, but I honestly don’t know if it’ll happen this year or not and the mulch alone will do wonders for the front of the house.

The bookshelves arrived today and I assembled the two white ones for the kitchen. They look much better than the wire shelving that was out there and once I make the curtains to go along the bottom sections I think they’ll look wonderful. The cabinet space in the kitchen is very limited, so the bookshelves are a welcome option until I can afford to redo the kitchen… something I don’t expect to do for at least the next couple of years.

All this house stuff is incredibly overwhelming. At a few points over the last few weeks since buying this house I’ve gotten caught up in all the things I want to do. I finally realized a couple of days ago that everything doesn’t have to be done at once and that I need to slow down and enjoy this process.

I’ve decided to focus on the projects that will return the biggest bang for the least amount of cash (which is why I’m spending most of my energy on the yard right now). Whenever I turn to the major indoor projects, I think I’ll do something about the flooring. I was standing in what Ginny and I have nicknamed Juliet’s Balcony last night looking at the carpet on the first floor and I was absolutely disgusted. It’s ugly to begin with but consider all the stains and dirt and it’s pretty depressing. The more I think about, the more I think I’ll just do laminate floor throughout the entire first floor. The cost can be reasonable and it’s a project that I could do with a little help from a friend or two. I think I could manage to do it one room at a time to break up the amount of cash I have to sink in to it all at once.

The majority of the trees I pruned back this weekend are Crape Myrtles. Yesterday afternoon I started to worry that maybe what I was doing wasn’t correct or in some way would damage the trees. I spoke to Mom last night and she assured me that it sounded like I was doing it right, and that even if I wasn’t Crape Myrtles can handle quite a bit. Normally I’m pretty good about doing my research beforehand, but in this case I didn’t really know where to start… I wasn’t even sure what kind of trees/shrubs they were until Mom said, “Yeah, they’re Crape Myrtles.”

This morning I found the following links:

Pruning Crape Myrtle
Crepe Myrtle Varieties
How to Prune (Crape Myrtles)

Apparently I’m doing things right. I think I might trim back a couple of trees to even fewer main trunks as I prefer the more tree-like appearance to the bush-like look. I was worried about taking too much away all at once, but these trees haven’t been touched in so long they need major attention.

Next weekend I’ll take another run at the Crape Myrtles and then dig out the shrubs on the side of the house. There’s one in front of the side deck that is absolutely horrible looking. It’s all twisted and gnarled and deserves to be finally put to rest.

If all else fails I can always fall back on my skills as a toilet repair man. To date I’ve completely overhauled all of the mechanical innards in both toilets in my house. No more phantom flushes here, my friends.