Santa Comes In August

I mean that literally-- Santa came to my house yesterday.  And he installed our new sliding screen doors in the dining room.  

No, really, he did.

Andy from Oregon Screen Crafts is a retired high-school shop teacher who makes awesome screen doors (and other screen things, of course).  He is also our local part-time Santa Claus, because we live in the kind of town where Santa also makes custom screen doors.  

Our quoted price was a very reasonable $337, including installation, for the pair of doors.  But one of the screens was slightly dinged in transit, so Andy offered to either a) make us a new door, or b) give us a $30 discount on the as-is door.  And when we inspected the screen and could baaaaaaaaaaaarely see the ding, we opted for the latter.  So really, Santa came and installed our screens and gave us a $30 discount.  I love Christmas!

 

In other news, the apple tree you see through my pretty new screens is out. of. control. 

Nowhere-Near-The-Curb Appeal

This weekend our full-on assault on the unruly backyard continued.  We bought a weed-whacker with a brush-cutter attachment and Ray attacked some of the crazy overgrowth at the back of our property.  I'm not really one for yard work (I have an irrational, if not entirely unfounded, fear of bees), so my contribution to our backyard beautification project was to paint the exterior doors on the back of our house.

When we first toured the house, I remember thinking that the back of it was completely hideous, and I've been meaning to dress it up for some time.  The French doors in the dining room were pale primer-gray inside and out-- they're security doors, and since they were close enough to white (I guess), nobody ever bothered to paint them.  I painted the insides with our trim paint about a week after we closed, and then I completely spaced on the outsides until this weekend.  There was also an unpainted primer-gray security door on our little shed under the covered patio, and I attacked it first.

Here's a before of the shed door:

Since you can't really tell how filthy it was in that photo, I'll pride a close-up of the doorknob:

Gross.  So anyway, this weekend it got a coat of primer and two coats of our front-door color (a dark, purpley brown-- I would've loved to go full-on plum, which I think would look awesome with our olive-green house, but I wasn't brave enough when I bought the door paint way back in August.  Maybe someday).  I somehow managed to forget to take an after photo, but you'll get a wide shot shortly.  You'll just have to wait.  Are you holding your breath?

Anyway, here's a shot of the French doors pre-paint job:

And post-paint:

Do we need to clean up our yardwork shoes?  And that old paper bag full of fireplace ashes?  Absolutely.  And the awful plastic light fixtures (you can see the left-hand one at the top left of the photo) need to be replaced with something that isn't patently hideous.  Still, I'll call this an improvement.

Wide shot:

See those weird ladder-y things on the left of the doors?  They were attached to the wall in the linen closet before I made it over.  Not sure what do do with them, but I do know I need to get them off the porch.  And the foam cooler and navy bin covered with painter's tape need to move to the shed-- they're full of grilling supplies.  But we're making progress.

Plans for the back porch obviously include the aforementioned cleanups and new light fixtures, and I'd like to get two big topiaries for either side of the door.  Eventually we'll get a weatherproof table and chairs.  I'm not sure what else to do with the deck, as it's a pretty awkward space, but I'll be on the lookout for ideas.

Here's a shot of the most of the back of the house, including the covered patio:

See?  It's just not cute.  Painting the doors made it look much more finished, but as you can see, we need to do some serious landscaping around the porch and along the foundation.  Some bushes, maybe?  Azaleas?  Perhaps a huge rhododendron between the kitchen windows?  And please try not to mind the cardboard on the patio-- I always use a big piece of old cardboard (I think that one's a RAST box) as the command center while painting, and I'd just finished all the doors.  The cardboard is awesome because it stops drips, gives you a worry-free place to set your paint cans / lids / church keys / brushes / rollers / roller trays / paint-y paper towels / paint stirrer, and allows for nice quick cleanup.  If you remember to clean it up, that is.

Speaking of landscaping, here's a quick shot of a poodle in his natural habitat: freshly bushwhacked weeds at the back of our property.

Yeah, we have a lot of work left to do.  But we've done a lot, and we're making progress one marathon weed-whacker session at a time.

Let's Go Outside

A couple of months ago, I showed you some photos of our ivy-covered trees.  Quick reminder:

We didn't take any real "before" photos, and what you're looking at here is my husband after an hour of bushwhacking to get in there as far as he is.  To imagine a true "before," picture the ivy that's surrounding Ray coming all the way to the ground.  There are a couple of other things to which I'd like to draw your attention in this photo:  see all the small trees sprouting up to Ray's left?  The bald, grass-less patch (where a random clump of bamboo used to be) behind him?  And the branches popping out of the ivy at the top right?  How about all the ivy growing on the ground-- see that?  And that tiny sliver of red to Ray's right-- it's our neighbors' garage.


Okay, well here's a shot I took today after lunch of the same spot:

Yes, that is is the same view.

First things first: what we've done.  

Ray has spent every free minute attacking the ivy in what we thought might be a too-late attempt to save the trees.  Good news: they're both alive!  Bad news: they're really weirdly shaped because the ivy was strangling their trunks.  Good news: the one on the left appears to be a healthy cherry tree!  Bad news: mature fruit trees = rats.  More bad news: somebody limbed the tree a million years ago and the fruit will be way too high for us to reach.  Even more bad news: the neighbors' garage isn't fully painted.  We didn't know that before.  Because we literally couldn't see it.  Still more bad news: we're going to have to replace that fence.  Obviously.  

We've also uprooted all those saplings and spent hours of our lives pulling ivy roots out of the ground-- some of them were easily 15ft long.  

This picture (featuring the right-hand tree) was taken in the middle of the process, just to give you some idea of what we were up against:

We've also seeded the bald patch where the bamboo used to be, and it's filling in nicely.  Today we seeded the dirt you see in the second photo-- where before there was nothing but ivy, there will now be lush green grass.

Here's another view (taken from our covered patio two months ago):

And a view from the same vantage point this afternoon:

 

Here's another view from the covered patio today.  Behold our verdant kingdom!

 All the dirt you see there was covered with ivy in the very recent past.

And speaking of our covered patio, we're making lots of changes out there and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.  In the meantime, can I get some applause for my incredibly hardworking and handsome husband?

Shave and a Haircut

No indoor projects to report on this week.  I blame this guy:

You may recognize him from a post way back in October-- he belongs to our friends.  When they go out of town, we always jump at the chance to host him at our place for a few days.  He's incredibly charming and polite, and seriously-- look at that face.

For obvious reasons I've been hesitant to bust out my painting supplies and attack the ceilings in the hallway, bathroom, and guest bedroom (all of which are shiny and yellow, ugh)-- it's just not good form to get paint in your borrowed poodle's lustrous curls.  And I felt weird about sewing with him underfoot too-- what if I dropped a straight pin and he stepped on it?  Am I just using him as an excuse to be lazy?  Maybe.  He likes couch naps almost as much as I do.

But we have been busy.  As I've mentioned before, our house was a rental for several years before we bought it, and during that time the lawn got a little wild completely insane.  When we first moved in, my dad detached a dying honeysuckle bush that was literally tied to the front of the house.  The following week Ray attacked the nine-foot hedge that had been obscuring the house from the street and ripped out the first of three epic clumps of bamboo that were on the chopping block.  Since then, he's pulled out the other two bamboo blobs, cleaned up the overgrowth on the left-hand side of our driveway, cleared the huge impassable thicket of blackberry bushes on the right-hand side of our house (literally, they were so overgrown that he discovered a five-foot-high metal gate hidden in the middle of them), denuded our massive buckeye tree of the ivy that was strangling it, and removed endless bags of leaves from the property.  Lest you wonder what Ray is doing while I'm fixing the bathroom ceiling, look no further than the yard.  Believe me, he's been busy out there.

Flash forward to today, the rarest of all things-- a sunny-ish Oregon winter day.  This is going to sound crazy, but we thought we had these two enormous trees on the left-hand side of our backyard until we discovered yesterday that they are actually two normal-sized (for the Pacific Northwest, anyway) trees that have been completely taken over by ivy.  Our pest-control man told us that the trees underneath would eventually die because of the resource-stealing ivy, and if they fall, our roof is toast.  Today we decided to hack some of the ivy away and try to figure out what we were working with.  Behold:

 

See all those leaves?  They're not from the tree.  They're from the ivy.  You can see some of the tree's branches popping out of the ivy towards the top.  Yeah, we thought the leaves were part of the tree too.  So if you look carefully you can see Ray in there detaching some of the ivy from the left-hand tree with 1) a hand saw, 2) clippers, and 3) a pry-bar.  The pile of ivy behind him represents half an hour of bushwhacking to get as far in as he is in this photo.  Doesn't LeBaron look concerned?

Here's another view:

Yes.  That is ivy.  Two different species, in fact.

Deep in the ivy thicket, Ray encountered a third (much smaller-- maybe 6" in diameter) tree heavily covered with vines.  It was leaning, so we decided to remove it.  Ray cut it in half, and when he tossed it onto the ivy pile, this is what we saw:

 

I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but the tree rotted away a long time ago and is completely hollow-- only its bark, held in place by the roots, remains.  The ivy murdered this little guy.

We decided that the best approach would be to cut the ivy off from its ground-roots by cutting a full circle around the tree-trunk (which was not visible because the roots were covering it so thickly).  Here's what it looked like after Ray cut all the way around it-- see the darker, narrower trunk the in center and the lighter gnarly roots lower down and higher up?

The other thing you're seeing in the photo is our fence, or what's left of it.  Like I said, the ivy was so thick that we'd never seen this section of it.  The ivy has actually pulled the fence out of the ground and is pushing it over into our yard.  Hello, Little Shop of Horrors.

Above is a wider shot of the progress.  That dirt-pile behind Ray was once a huge (maybe 10ft high?) bamboo clump that was just randomly in the middle of the yard for no reason at all-- it'll get grass-seeded in a few weeks.  Anyhow, see all those hanging vines to Ray's right?  See the poodle-butt on the left?  Hehehe.

So this is a totally overwhelming project that will probably take one million years to complete (our town offers yard-waste pickup service once a week, so we've been operating on a fill-the-bin-wait-a-week-fill-the-bin schedule to remove our plentiful yard debris), but we're eventually hoping to make the left side of the backyard match the much-more-civil right side:

Yep, we've got a lot of work to do.  And yes, we see the ivy growing up that tree.  We're on top of it.