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. 

Big Screen

When we bought our house, it kind of had a screen door.

Kind of, you say?  

Yes, kind of (per this photo from August 2012):

So, yeah.  Not cute.  It was 1) unpainted, 2) torn, 3) incorrectly installed-- see the big silver hinges screwed into the door molding?  And it didn't have a pneumatic closer (obviously), so if you wanted to hold it open, you had to do it like this:

 

Yes, what you're looking at is the old screen door TIED to the front of the house.  

My dad removed it for us (along with the dead bush that was tied to the house on the other side of the door) about a week after we closed on the house.  He tried to buy a new hinge for it and reattach it properly, but by that point both the door and the door frame had been damaged beyond repair.  There was pretty much no way to make that door work.

So we went nearly a year without a screen door-- not really a big deal except that none of the other windows in our living room / dining room area can be opened.  So when it's hot out, it's also pretty stuffy in the living area.  After a bunch of warm, beautiful days left us sweating profusely as we watched TV, on Saturday we finally decided to head over to the Home Depot and see what they had in the way of screen doors.  

Our minds were totally blown when we walked in and encountered the perfect door for $148: already the exact same color as our front door (how in the hell does that happen?), precisely the right size, in stock, etc.  And it promised an easy install (which we were not stupid enough to fall for-- we know by now that there's no such thing as an easy install).  So we handed over a $50 gift card we had left over from Christmas and coughed up the remaining $98.  Feeling cautiously optimistic, we headed home and started the install.

And really, it was easy!  Well, it would have been easy except for three tiny little things:

FIRST SNAFU: While we were hacksawing the frame pieces to fit into our door opening, our hacksaw blade snapped in half.  That left us to find the other (broken) hacksaw and change out the broken blade for the whole one.  If you've ever tried to change a hacksaw blade, you know you have to fit two microscopic pins through two microscopic holes on either end of the tiny blade, then quickly jam the whole thing into the hacksaw frame before the pins fall out.  Time lost due to the broken blade: 15min

SECOND SNAFU: We were supposed to drill the holes for the door handle with a 5/16" drill bit.  We didn't have one, but we had a 1/4" bit.  We were much too lazy to go all the way back to the Home Depot after a drill bit just 1/16" bigger than the one we already had, so we decided to make it work.  We eventually succeeded.  Let's just leave it at that.  Time lost due to our stubbornness: 30min

THIRD SNAFU:  During the drill-bit-too-small-for-the-job disaster, I somehow managed to drop the teeny-tiny spring mechanism that fits inside the door handle.  The spring bounced, and we could. not. find. it. anywhere.  This culminated in me sweeping the entire driveway and then sifting through the dirt with my fingers.  I finally found it.  Time lost due to my clumsiness: 1hr.

But now we have a functional, attractive screen door that lets the fresh air in!  And it doesn't have to be tied to our house!  Hurray!

Pardon the disgusting iPhone photo as always.  Anyway, as you can see, we have lots of work do to on the landscaping front.  We've done a ton to the front of the house (installed house numbers, chopped the 10ft hedge that obscured the house from the street, painted the mullions in the big bay window, painted the front door, weeded, etc etc) but we know we have miles to go before we sleep.  More on that in a soon-to-come post.

In the meantime, meet my new friends on the back deck:

Juniper spiral topiaries!  On the hunt for the right pots.  Onward and [outdoors]ward!

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?