Back In Action. Lots and Lots of Action.

I haven't been on the blog much the past month.  There were some personal things I had to take care of that occupied 100% of my time for a few weeks; and at the moment I'm neck-deep in a few different projects.  So far, I don't have much to show you, but I figured I'd at least tell you what's going on:

1. Refinishing A Corner Desk 

Once upon a time, someone ruined a perfectly good piece of furniture.  I'm not normally one of the "Never ever paint wood!" people.  I prefer stained to painted, it's true, but I know that either can be done well and produce an attractive piece.  This desk is neither of those things. 

It's a five-legged corner desk with a drawer, made of solid walnut, which was once stained (badly) and then painted (badly!!)  twice.  The paint job is full of drips and mucky thick spots; the top of the desk is cracked all over, which could be age, or lack of proper surface prep in the paint process, or both.  Also, the original drawer was, at one time, replaced at one time with a badly-constructed one made of cheap pine. It doesn't fit the desk well, and is so thick-walled and over-engineered you'd think someone was using it to store very small explosives.

Regardless, overall, it's a potentially gorgeous piece. The walnut wood itself is in great shape, and so far, it's stripping nicely, so I'm hopeful that I can restore this thing to its former glory.  I have no idea how old the desk is - I think at least 80s, maybe 70s (?)  The hardware is oddly shaped, and blackened and rusted with age; but it's sound, and so far I've been able to clean most of it up pretty well.  I haven't seen a maker's mark yet that might give me a clue as to where and when it came from;  I'm hoping I'll find it buried under paint. I hope it wasn't on that missing drawer.

2.  Repurposing the Bicycle Storage Area Dining Room

The desk is part of an ongoing repurposing of the dining room.  Let's be real here:  I don't use a dining room, or own  any dining room furniture.  I eat in front of the TV.  So  I've got this big, empty room which is flooded with natural light, and adjacent to both the kitchen and the living room.  It's well-lit, and there's a ceiling fan. 

Oh, hey, look!  There's that corner desk in the picture, behind my mountain bike.  

Anyway, 90% of the things that were stuffed into this room temporarily have been removed to other locations, and this room is about to become a(nother) shared creative space - a room where I can set up my big easel and start painting again, and where Sylvan can sit and work on her novels on days she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  I'm also about to start remodeling and refinishing a table for her to use as a writing desk. 

3.  Creating An Outdoor Entertaining Space From Scratch

I used to have a really pretty, comfortable back porch space, many years ago.  I'm not entirely sure what happened to it over the years, but, new house: new awesome patio.  Right now I'm only window-shopping (my last surviving patio chair is on it's last legs), hunting around for patio furniture and decorative stuff. 

The Zilker Garden Festival is this weekend.  I haven't been in a few years, but it's an AWESOME little weekend event, and I plan to come home with many, many plants for the patio - decorative flowery things, vegetables for a container garden, maybe a small potted tree? 

Y'all, I bought my very first leafblower this week.  Do you live in central Texas, or somewhere else chock full of Live Oak Trees?  Then you feel me when I say: fuck those messy, crusty, little oak flowers!  And all that nasty, sticky, yellow pollen!!  UGH.  The mountains of stiff leaves aren't helping anybody, either.  They're not even terribly good for compost, because they're so thick and hard that they take forever to break down.  Those leaves and crunchy little flower strings are about to become my bitch.   

I'll have updates over the next couple of weeks on how all this is going.  I'm hoping the corner desk will come first.  I'm having a lot of fun working on it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out! 

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Meanwhile, wanna see a gross spider pic?  I thought you would: 

This is Frances.  Frances is a Funnel Web spider (Agelenidae) who lives on my front porch. She's about an inch long, and occupies a corner right next to the front door, by the doorbell.  Needless, perhaps, to say: people don't ring my doorbell anymore. 

Frances is harmless to people (she's not related to the Australian Funnel Web spiders you may have heard about).  She enjoys collecting dead bugs and hiding behind the trim on the siding, and usually cleans out her web long before it reaches this embarrassing state.  Bad Frances. 

Frances has an upstairs neighbor named Rapunzel who has a web about three feet up the wall.  I don't know what kind of spider she is.  She's much pointier in the leg and rounder in the body, and a bit larger.  I think she's some sort of false widow, but I haven't gotten a really good look at her just yet. 

Anyway, back soon!

The To-Do Barrel

Since finishing the shelfy nook in the living room, I haven't done much around the house.  Truth be told, I have SO much to do that I'm not even sure what to do next.  My to-do list feels less like a list than it does a giant barrel full of tasks that I have to jump into in order to pick one.  And there are sharks in it. And piranhas. And bears. There are definitely bears in there, you guys.

However, the weather's been absolutely amazing, and Spring seems to be springing several weeks early this year.  So over the weekend I turned my back on my barrel of tasks and turned the unused garden beds in the front yard into actual gardens.  Wanna see? Click here. 

But what's next inside the house?  I basically just need to pick a room:

The Back Room
The 2-car garage this house was built with was turned into an enclosed room and a 1-car garage many, many years ago. The resulting room was home to children, roommates, couch-surfing friends, and, eventually, a semi-feral cat with no respect for the litter box, and just mounds and mounds of trash, full of mice and bugs and mold. BLEH. This room is currently the worst part about this house - but hey, fixer-upper, right?

This room needs cleaning, flooring replacement, repairs to the closet doors, repairs to the room door and trim, replacement of an electrical outlet and all the face plates on outlets and switches, repairs to the walls, prime & paint on all the walls, the ceiling, and the trim molding.  Fun! 

This room is high on the priority list because next week is Bulk Trash Pickup - I can get the last bits of junk out of here, and get the carpet out of the house.  Since it's going to be emptied anyway, I might as well get to renovating it. 



The Master Bathroom
This room is also high on the list, because we use it so often. There's a big walk-in shower with a bench and several sprays, which makes it the preferred human-washing space (and I also use it to wash the dogs).

It needs repairs to the grout and tile in the shower enclosure, repairs to the walls, prime and paint on all the walls, trim molding, doors, and ceiling, and the pendant lights over the vanity need to be seated correctly (they're loose at the ceiling).  Also, there are two walk-in closets in the bathroom, and neither one has a door.


The Craft Room
A.ka. master bedroom, turned into a joint craft space like we did in the old house.  Everything in here works pretty well, except the wall color, which is crime-scene red. It needs primer and paint, and the baseboards need to be finished the way I did in the living room (caulking in the nail holes, joints, and seam against the wall, and then painted), as well as paint on the trim molding and windowsills, new blinds, and curtains for the sliding glass doors that open out onto the back patio.


The Kitchen
I pretty much have carte-blanche to fix things and decorate/paint however I want in this house, but the kitchen cabinets are one of the few things my land-friend specifically asked me to do.  The cabinets themselves need to be stripped and painted, one cabinet door needs to be repaired, and they all need handles and/or knobs. 

Popcorn needs to be scraped off of the soffit above the upper cabinets, the walls and ceiling need to be painted, and all the baseboard molding needs to be finished out.  There's a ceiling fan in the breakfast nook that doesn't work - that'll need to be repaired or replaced, as well.  The light fixture in the room is a fluorescent fixture with a wooden frame and plastic "stained glass" decorative cover (1984, y'all. I actually kind of love it)  - the cover needs to be cleaned thoroughly, and 3 of the 4 fluorescent tubes are out and need to be replaced. The pendant light over the sink is loose at the ceiling, and needs to be seated properly.


And All the Rest
Specific rooms aside, pretty much all the rest of the baseboard trim in the house needs to be finished out, all the doors and door trim molding painted, kids' stickers removed from some doors and walls (my mother would have killed me for that!), and all the ceilings either dusted or just repainted.  Most of the electrical outlets in the house have paint on them, except for the few I've scraped clean while painting other rooms. 

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Because of the timing with Bulk Day, I'll probably tackle the back room first - it makes sense to get started while it's empty, and get it done and out of the way.  I really don't want to. I like pretending that room doesn't exist.  On the upside, I do have a three-day weekend coming up, so I should have plenty of time to at least make a big dent in that room, if not finish it entirely. I'll let you all know how it goes. 

It Goes "Ding" When There's Stuff!

I wasn't going to sew anything for one month after I got back from SCA Gulf Wars, since I'd been sewing practically nonstop for four months straight; but I did break that rule for this, yesterday:

No kidding, I've had this purple jersey knit fabric sitting in a bag for _over a year_ waiting for me to "just be done with this one project" before I'd start it.  Meanwhile, the knit bathrobe I made for myself in 2008 was literally full of holes (puppy) and falling apart at the seams.  So I made this one to replace it.  The pattern is the same as the Japanese clothing I've made in the past for Sir Takuan's samurai costumes in the SCA, and also the one I used for my short, silk robe/cover-up last year.

SO COMFY WOW.  

I've also been working in the yard - cleaning up, and building new garden beds in the backyard.  This is the year I get back out into the garden, yay!  I'm in the midst of it this weekend; I'll have pics when I'm done.  (More details on my garden blog).  

Don't worry, I'm up to my EYEBALLS in stuff I'm working on in the house, too, and I'll have posts and pics later this week! I also have a spiffy new phone coming in the mail in a couple of days - with a better camera on it!  :D 

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Results Not As Expected

Mkay, so, remember in June when I tore down the old vine trellis on the back porch  and put up a smaller one?  It looked like this when I was done:

Before: 

(yes, the invisible wire thing strung between the two horizontal  rails)

Well, it's been two months, and the thing is just COVERED in fresh, green, beautiful vines!

After: 

wait...

Guess what I didn't notice in June?  The top rail was rotted through on one end!  ARGH.    It won't be a huge deal to replace it: I'll just have to cut the vines back below the level of the top of the trellis, cut through the twine holding the wire screen onto the rail, put up a new rail, and then tie it back together.

I hope.

FAIL.

Screw: "Idk what you guys are talking
about, I did my job." 

Also:

Guys, I don't think the Hibiscus is going to make it. 

Tree Maintenance

Last month, I don't remember if I mentioned it - I sure as heck didn't post any pictures, because I forgot to take any (d'oh!) - I pruned that big Mulberry tree in the backyard.  It had grown about five million water sprouts (small, weak branch-lets that grow from the main branches, and are pretty much useless - at best they make a tree look ragged, at worst they can actually cause structural damage, and are highly prone to disease and insect infestation).   The sprouts had grown so long that they were dragging the ground on all sides, and the tree looked like a giant, green, hairy lollipop.  NOT GOOD.

Today, as I had the day off from work, I did the same thing to the Mexican Orchid Tree:

Before: 

This is the MOT before pruning.  It's basically just a giant mound of plant.

It's eight feet wide.  I am not even kidding.

Witness also the roll of hardware fencing sitting next to it, that I never put away after re-doing the porch trellis.

In fact, the black thing standing up against the house on the right is the old trellis.  Way to put your toys away when you're done with them, me!  Ugh.










During:

Hi, Raven!  I had to take this picture twice. Daisy was pooping
behind the tree the first time and I didn't notice.  Ewwww.

Fact: it's 113º out today.  

This is the part where I get most of the heavy pruning done and go sit inside in the a/c for thirty minutes before I can finish, so I don't DIE.

Most of the main branches that had grown out sideways, or up and then bent down, have been removed at this point.












After:

you can kinda see the similar shape of the
Mulberry in this pic, too. 

All finished, yay!  *sweat*sweat*sweat*


All the mini-sprouts have been pruned out as well, and all the smaller branches that were growing sideways or down.  I've also cut out all the suckers that were popping up from the ground around the plant, and removed some of the thick stumpy branch-ends that were left over in the crown of the plant from branches I cut off last year.  (I forgot they were there - the bush covered them up!)

I raked the ground flat, got rid of the mound of dead leaves carpeting the ground under the tree, and swept the patio stones that were covered up by the tree - you can see here that they were never taken up and re-arranged when I did the circles pattern with the stones last year.  I'm AWESOME at being thorough, aren't I?  Yeesh.

This thing was HUGE, you guys.  There's a nearly-perfectly-circular area around the MOT where there's no grass at all, even between the stones on the patio.  You can't see it in the pic, but there's also a Garlic Chives plant under the left side that I thought had died long ago.  Nope!  It just got eaten by the tree.

Raven, in his search for a cool patch of ground to lay in, has dug two dog-shaped holes under this thing, too.  SIGH.  Next time I feel like braving the blistering central Texas heat, I'll dig out the compost bin and fill the holes, then cover the area with some more of these patio stones to keep him from doing it again and possibly damaging the tree.

I was bitten by a spider while I was pruning.  Yay!  I wonder if I'll get super-powers now.




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And Now A Long Post About Plants!

Or, rather, about my front garden:

Before: 

I loved this garden, don't get me wrong.  I just really wanted a small, sort of cottage-y thing out there instead.  And since most of the plants in it worked already, it just took a little tweaking.  Okay, kind of a lot of tweaking.

nice trash cans, neighbors, thanks. 

After During:

Changes:

• removed the giant Rosemary. Sad, yes, but it was overgrown for the space and crowding things out, and starting to suffer, itself. 
• Re-located the Loropetalum
• Bumped the border out into a somewhat-convex line instead of a concave one, adding about four square bed feet to the front. 

•  Relocated the Indigo* from the "inside" of the bed (by the front walk) to the "outside" where the Rosemary was
• added a French Lavender in the same corner
• mulched with fresh compost from the bin in the backyard
• added a white Easter Lily in the center back (on sale, $6!) 

The front of the bed IS a very slightly convex, and smooth line, I promise.  Those dumbass stones make it look all wonky, though.  Those will be going away very soon, and replaced with...something else.

The Loropetalum now lives next to the #$%^& electrical box in the front yard.  It's going through some hellacious transplant shock;  I really hope it makes it. :S



So, the garden is nowhere NEAR finished, and won't be for a long while.  There's a TON of work to be done, and not just in smoothing out the border and dealing with the stones.  There's a little wattle fence to build (out of the rosemary branches, and some prunings from the backyard that I saved from last Fall), and a bunch of stuff to plant.


Plants in the garden right now: 
white Yarrow (Achilea millefolium)
"Before the Storm" and a pale purple German Bearded Irises (Iris germanica)
Australian Indigo (Indigofera australis)
French Toothed Lavender (Lavandula dentata)
a white, single-petaled Rose, unknown variety (clearance plant, hehe)

Next steps...
Remove the stones and replace with a new edging, show you when it's done. :)
In the Fall, when it's time to divide Irises, I need to remove about half of them to the back yard, and then spread the other half out around the bed more evenly, instead of in three big clumps like it is now.

Also want to add: 

A red rose to fill in the rest of the corner where the Rosemary was, along with the Lavender and Indigo.  

More Lilies to accompany the one I planted in the center back, for height and drama back there
Some Larkspurs and/or Delphiniums in the back, too
Strawberry plants in the hanging baskets (to keep critters out of them)
Some small herbs and bulbs to fill in around the ground - Thyme, Anemones (coronaria and blanda), etc.
Either a birdbath or small statue, or some combination of both

buttery-white (and over-exposed) rose in the sprinkler :) 

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A Short Post About Plants

Since I couldn't decide what exactly to do with the herbs I got at the Zilker Garden Festival a couple of weekends ago, I went ahead and put them in pots on the back porch, for now.  I can still transplant them into the ground later if I want to, provided I don't wait so long that it gets too hot. 

from the bottom up:  Jamaica Hibiscus, Applemint,
French Lavender.  The last one is the Lemon Balm
I found in the yard a few weeks ago.  

the French Lavender. 

White Yarrow, a survivor of the ex-herb garden, still in its
original spot.  I could move it, but I kind of like it where it is.
It's almost monumental. 

Meanwhile, I really love the front garden bed this year.
Really pretty mix of foliage types and colors.   

And the rose is doing spectacularly well, with almost no help
from me at all (all I do is deadhead it). 

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Zilker Garden Festival '12

Kress and I trekked out to Zilker Botanical Gardens' 55th annual Garden Festival last weekend.  As usual, there were plenty of plants for sale, all sorts of home- and hand-made artisan goods for your home and garden,  tons of food, live music, and gorgeous things in the botanical gardens themselves.  Take a look:

(pics by me and Kress)

In the Hartman Prehistoric Garden, complete with bronze Ornithomimus

In the Taniguchi Japanese Garden

in the Mabel Davis Rose Garden

"Chrysler Imperial" rose

a Mock Orange

Pink Bluebonnets! 

a "black" Nicotiana 

Kress and The Mother Tree, in the Japanese gardens.  He's holding the herbs we
bought from one of the vendors: a red Jamaican Hibiscus, Applemint, and French Lavender.

me on the Moon Bridge in the Japanese Gardens

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Dirt

1.   Found a single 18" cement stepping stone in the garage when I was cleaning it last night. Put it in the corner here between the driveway and the front walk, so we can quit walking on the bare spot where we're trying to get grass to grow.

2.  Filled eroded low area here with soil and dirt culled from stacks of flowerpots in the garage that still had soil in them (which got cleaned and stacked neatly in the garage after).





It's the little things.

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Gardening: I Has It!

The other thing that happened over the weekend, after I got back from vacation, was a LOT of yardwork.  This last Sunday, the front yard got a good mowing and a fresh coat of grass seed (maybe it'll grow this time..?)

The back yard got the same treatment, along with some flower seeds in/near the shady corner garden - a mix of pink and red and white Cosmos, some native annual and perennial wildflowers, and larkspurs. Yay!

I also found some really cool stuff around the yard:

a volunteer Lemon Balm seedling in the yard!!!  Another plant
joins the ranks of survivors of the Martian Death Fungus. I
potted it up to keep it safe, and to keep it from spreading into
unwanted places, as mints are prone to doing. 

New berries/flowers on the Mulberry tree

OMG LOOK GRASS!!!

The little Chasteberry I planted last Fall, going strong! 

A white Yarrow, one of only three plants in the former Herb Garden
to have survived the Martian Death Fungus in the first place.  Until
this spring, it survived as a wee, weak sprout.  Now it's glorious! 

I heart my Mulberry tree. :) 

Unfortunately for the grass seed in the front yard, and the flower seed in the backyard, last night it stormed like you would not believe.  I knew it was going to rain, but I neglected to check the weather reports, or I'd have seen that it was going to rain frogs and plagues, and wash away not only my fresh seeds, but also about half the dirt in the part of the backyard still mostly only covered by dirt.  SIGH.

plans for the veggie beds I want to build in the backyard...

Hey, guess what? I built something.  Show you tomorrow. :)


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Meanwhile, In the Jungle (the Mighty Jungle)

...my jungle's looking less than mighty these days.  It's been a bad year for houseplants.  It happens sometimes. Some plants smother and die if they're covered with dust for too long (which is a housekeeping issue).  Some get sunburned if exposed to direct sunlight for too long.  Some get bugs, some get eaten by dogs, and all plants die of old age, eventually.

My collection, which numbered in the thirties just two years ago, is now down to nineteen individual plants, most of which are 6-8" pots (small) or just jars of cuttings gone wild.  I hadn't even counted, in a while, until yesterday as I was tidying up the house and moving some furniture around, and thought, "This spot just needs a plant," and then realized, as I looked around, that I didn't have any extra plants that could be moved!  

What.

The hell.

The Bird of Paradise in the picture above, for example, has come down with a horrible case of Scale (insects).  It's had them for years, actually - and they don't really do much damage, as long as you keep them under control (because they're damned near impossible to kill on this particular plant without resorting to using something so harsh that it would kill the plant as well, because of the way they burrow down between the plant's stalks where I can't get at them).

Every couple of months I take it out into the backyard and hose them off, which perks the plant up and knocks the dust off the leaves, too.  I give all my plants outdoor showers, periodically (or indoor showers, for the ones that fit into the kitchen sink), but I'd been putting off doing it for the Bird of Paradise all Winter, and it's really starting to show.  It's getting a bath this weekend, though. 

I really, really want a new Aralia.  That's a "Parsley" Aralia above; I used to have two of them, and a small Ming Aralia.  Aralias are a bit finicky about watering frequency, and it can be difficult for them to adjust to being moved to a new location/sunlight exposure all of a sudden, as I found out when I lost all three in the same months after I moved them all around.  :(     Because of how slowly they grow (and due in large part to the way in which they're grown), Aralias are expensive, and hard to find in local nurseries; but I think the next time I come across one, I'll pick it up.  I really miss having one around. 

I also really miss my old Clivia (that's "clive-ee-ya" with a long I, not a short I like in "ship," by the way).  This pic is a yellow-flowered variety that I used to have, in its second year;  it eventually doubled in size, and although I didn't ever get it to bloom indoors after the flowers that it came with were finished blooming (it takes lots of work to achieve this, I'm so not up for it), it was a GORGEOUS plant.  Evidently it's also really tasty to puppies. 

gee, I wonder which one I could be talking about...

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Alive

I got a wild hair this morning and just felt like mowing the grass in the back yard.  What little there is.  With the weed-eater, since the mower actually doesn't work.  There was enough grass, enough weeds, and enough dead leaves floating around that I thought I might be able to get the compost bin re-booted with what I could cut and scrape up with the rake.  

Imagine my surprise when, upon digging out and turning over what I thought was a dead compost bin - not having been fed or turned since it got so blisteringly hot in June this year - I found a compost bin very much alive.  Gross and dry on top from not having been turned, yes (and there was a sock in it - wth?), but underneath was fluffy, rich, soft, black, fragrant compost.  Mmm.  

And I also found that the 'Delfino' Cilantro that I found back in the corner by the compost bin has not only come back, but re-seeded itself all over that corner - the whole area is filled with baby Cilantros, and baby Yarrows.  Seemingy out of "nowhere". 

A promise for the turning of the year?  Hope is a thing with leaves.




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Surprise Flowers!

I love gardening moments like this, especially after the bad gardening year it's been.  I went camping over the past weekend, and came back to find the 'Romantika' Clematis in the backyard, which partly covers the temporary fencing in front of the bed I built last month behind the back porch, in full bloom:

<3