It’s the promised gardening post!

So, when we first put down the grass back at the end of October, we left an area around the tree on the right hand side of the lawn grass-less. You can see that area in this picture:

We though that it might be nice to create a little flowerbed around the tree, as well as possibly create a path to the driveway – which there was when the ivy was in place, as you can see from this picture:

(Ugh, that ivy!)

But we didn’t do anything right away, because, well, it was winter and not really the time to be planting flowers. So a whole lot of weeds decided they wanted to grow in that space instead:

But as the weather got warmer, gardening began to be on my mind more and more. One lovely weekend in early March, I went to Lowe’s on an errand and was struck by a particularly colorful display of plants arranged outside the entrance. The next day I went back and ended up buying a bunch of the plants I had seen – the begonias and the caladium, in their gorgeous purple and red and green – as well as some coleus, which had some more of the green and purple colors in it. I also got some mulch and potting soil.

First I pulled out all the weeds, then I called my mother-in-law (the Texas certified master gardener) because I really had no clue what I was doing. She came over later, and along with Kelly and my brother-in-law Skip, we got all the plants in the ground.

Because the ground kind of slopes up on this side of the lawn, we discovered that we were going to need to create some kind of retaining wall on the side of this bed near the walkway. So Kelly and Skip hauled a bunch of the bricks from the pile in the back yard (left there by previous owners…) and created a little wall:

Look how much color we added to our front yard!

You might have noticed this little detail in Kelly’s sketch from the last post:

That is not something just the future when we build the fireplace – it exists now, because I made it!

I had been wanting to keep our firewood in something other than the uber-ugly plastic milk crate it existed in all winter, and got the idea to get a little crafty with a $15 galvanized tub from my local thrift store. (And when I say “local,” I mean 6 blocks away, local…)

First, I got Kelly to find a nice modern, but not too cold, font and print out the word “Firewood.” Then, after cleaning off the outside of the tub, I used a spray-adhesive to arrange the letters around one side. It was a good thing that adhesive was labeled “repositionable” because it took me 3 tries to get the letters to fit just right.

For a little more detail, I masked off one section of the tub with painter’s tape.

Then I started priming and painting. Forgive these next few pictures – I started this project in the late afternoon and by the time I got to painting, it had gotten dark. I was working in the backyard by the glow of the floodlight.

Then, when everything was dry, I removed the letters and the painter’s tape and had a cool new bin for firewood!

And here it is with wood in it, next to our (yet to be renovated) fireplace.

Who wants to see some gorgeous wood on our refinished stairs?

You can see at the very top of the last photo that after the last coat of poly was dry, Kelly started covering the stairs over with paper, so that when we paint the risers, we won’t have to deal with cleaning up drips of paint. It started to hurt his back and knees, so he only got about halfway up the stairs.

But that was enough for me to start priming the risers and the trim.

This whole process of finishing the stairs is going to take a while, as it includes spackling, sanding, caulking, priming, painting, cutting quarter-round and installing it, painting some more…

But you can already tell the difference it is going to make:

While my parents were here in town, they wanted to help with the stair project. My dad helped to pull up some carpet during the first phase and then he waited for a few weeks while Kelly worked on the sanding part, which as I mentioned, took a lot longer than we had anticipated.

The plan was that my dad would come over in the morning after we had all gone to work and stain his way down the stairs and let it dry before we got back home from work. We had bought a water-based stain so that it would dry more quickly, and it really did! I was home from work one of the days he applied the stain, and it was dry by the early afternoon. And since I was home, I was able to get some pictures of my dad in action, working on the stairs.

One of the things we had been worried about was that the raw wood had some areas that were darker and some that were lighter, after sanding away the lacquer stripe. And even after the first coat of stain went down, you could still see some lighter areas:

But we shouldn’t have worried – after the 2nd coat of stain, the color was perfectly even and dark and gorgeous!

(yes, there are more posts coming! Next up: adding the poly…)

Sanding the stairs took a lot longer than Kelly had been expecting, because of that stripe of varnish running down the center of the stairs, that had been under a runner at some point in the past.

Kelly started in on the sanding a few weeks back, but quickly discovered that the varnish was gumming up the sandpaper pads for the circular sander he had rented. The smaller palm sander that he owns worked better, but using the smaller sander was taking forever.

After a number of hours and many more sandpaper pads, Kelly took the advice of one of his coworkers and used a lacquer thinner to help strip off some of the thick lacquer so that the sanding could go quicker. And it did!

So here are a few pictures of the gorgeous raw wood.

And get this! The treads going around the corner are one solid piece of wood!

Up next: staining the wood…

We began the process of ripping up the carpet on the stairs a few weeks ago, when my parents were in town. I was so glad to see that nasty carpet go.

And we were very happy to find good wood underneath all that carpet! We also uncovered evidence that the stairs had previously looked like what we want to do with them: stained treads, white painted risers.

However, there had also been a runner on the stairs, which meant that there was a thick stripe of lacquer on the treads, which made the sanding process a lot longer than we had wanted.

More about the sanding process in the next post!

We have already done quite a lot of work on the staircase refinishing project, including ripping up carpet, sanding and putting down two coats of stain. But before I blog about the process, I need to show you what we were working with in the first place.

Here are the bottom steps of the staircase, which are in the hallway off of the living room. Check out the cool bench seat! It currently holds a bunch of crap that we have thrown in there in tidying up before people come over to the house…

The paint is all peeling off, the carpet was horribly dirty and stained and generally, the stairs were just unappealing.

We have already replaced the faded red curtains that came with the house, painted a red accent wall next to the bench seat, hung some pictures and a coat rack and replaced the landing lighting. At this point, I thought we needed to catch the rest of the landing and staircase up with the other things we’ve done.

Because frankly, this staircase is horrible and needs major work:

So, here is the plan. The staircase treads we will refinish in a nice walnut color, and we will paint the risers white. Sort of like this:

Picture from Apartment Therapy

We are also planning on painting the rest of the walls a light gray color, and keeping the trim the same bright white as the risers. Kelly and I are still debating on whether to paint the trim detail on the banister around the bench seat with that same gray with white trim detail. I’m for it, Kelly isn’t sold yet. We’ll let you know how it goes…

I [Kelly] asked a guy I went to school with (a friend from junior high and a classmate all the way through college) who is a landscape architect what he thought would be the best grass for our situation. That situation being about 70% shade and hot as the inside of a toaster oven in the fifth season in Texas, other wise known as August.

For those who don’t live here, August really starts in mid May and usually doesn’t end until the final bits of September and often runs right into October. It doesn’t get hot like Arizona hot. It just gets stiflingly warm and then stays there. Maybe a ten or fifteen degree difference between three in the afternoon and three in the morning. Temps during the waking hours average around 90-95 for several months on end. It works on you like a water torture or like adding a pound a day to a weight on your chest. The first cool breezes from the north are oh so very refreshing. We really love the coming of Fall around here. And, according to my state certified master gardener mother, Fall is the time to sod a yard in Central Texas.

Anyway… so I asked my friend about the best grass for the area and he said there are two choices. St. Augustine and Zoysia. He said that St. Augustine is a water hog and is prone to disease, even though you’d think with a name like that it would be perfect for the fifth season. I also remember as a kid that, even though it looks nice, it is kind of prickly and not pleasant for little ones to roll around on. And in case you didn’t know, we plan to roll around on some grass with some little ones some day, so you have to think about these things in advance.

The Zoysia (pronounced zoi-see-uh), has a silly sounding name but is a hardy grass from Asia and requires very little water. It is thinner and softer so it passes the crawling-through-the-grass test. The only caveat is that we were told to expect to pay one-and-a-half to two times as much for it. I called Barrerra Landscaping and Supply and they had it for only 50% more than the other stuff, so hurray! Ellen and I added three cubic yards of compost, since we got a deal, and I called my buddy Josh, who has a huge gas powered tiller he said I could borrow.

All of the stuff showed up on a Friday afternoon and Jack and I got to work spreading the compost right after dinner. Wanting to get the compost spread before morning, we worked until about 9:30pm by the light of the front porch and with headlamps strapped on. One of the neighbor guys said we were “hard core” for working in the dark. The thing is, once the grass goes on palettes, it has to come back off within a few days or it kills it. No time to waste waiting for light to come back in the morning.

After a mug of hot coffee the next morning, I filled the last low spots with the remaining compost and fired up the tiller. What a beast! That thing chewed through the ground like it was a stale Oreo cookie. The awesome thing is, in addition to several inches of fresh compost, the ground had been covered in leaves every year for over 25 years while that Vinca vine was on there. After mixing it all together with the tiller, we have tons of great soil just waiting for the sod to be laid down on it.

Next step? SOD IT! Sorry, couldn’t resist. Jack would bring me sod rectangles from the palettes and I would carefully remove any last debris from the soil and smooth it out level with my hands and then put the sod in its place. Really, that is about all there was to it. It is just that there was SO MUCH of it to put down! We spent the rest of Saturday getting the smaller patch of grass done and then had something or other to do that afternoon. As a result, less than half of the grass went down on the first day.

Sunday went about the same at first, but my brother Skip came over to help out, so things went a lot faster. Ellen had to work Saturday, so having her help as she lugged the grass patches over to me as I placed them was great. With a larger crew, we worked at a much better pace and most of the rest of the front was done by dinner time. A happy surprise was that we seemed to have about 25% more grass than we estimated it would take. I don’t know if the sod company just tossed on extra grass since the sodding season is pretty much over or if my math skills need serious revision. The upshot is that we had enough left over to do the side yard and the “tree lawn” as folks from Northeast Ohio call the little strip of land between the sidewalk and the curb. I love the term and have willingly added it to my vocabulary. Most of the extra sod went down Monday night after work.

We have been watering regularly, but not too much, for a couple of weeks now and it really looks nice. Some of the tips are starting to get higher, but I have been told not to mow for quite a while. It seems that the the roots grow about the same as the blades and stop growing when the blades are cut. The longer we wait, the better for the roots.

Lots of folks from the neighborhood say it looks great and they always ask what kind of grass it is. I smile and try to pronounce it properly, but I always get a puzzled look and a “What did you say?” in return. I don’t care what it is called, I’m just glad to have a pretty lawn and no more vines.

Yesterday, the landscaping company delivered a truckload of compost and 3 pallets of sod, so today Kelly and Jack are hard at work laying the sod on the newly ivy-free dirt lawn. While they are working, I thought I would post some pictures of an interesting discovery we made after the ivy was removed.

Notice those two pieces of concrete bracketing the sidewalk? Yep! We unearthed some ancient planter boxes! They had been completely covered in dirt and ivy that we had no idea that they were even there.

Because we had already been thinking that we wanted to somehow flank the sidewalk with some kind of flowers or bushes (what we will do exactly is yet to be determined…) we will not cover them up with grass, but leave them as they are.

But eventually they will most likely be covered up with dirt again, as they’re buried pretty deep, and Kelly wants to make the border to the pathway be more organic, with curvy lines, not straight like the concrete planters.

When we were in New Braunfels a couple of weeks ago, Ellen dropped by the Restoration Hardware outlet store and picked up a little something for the front porch to replace the horrible ceiling fan that was on the porch. I think this thing must be left over from when people used to sleep on the front porch back before air conditioning was invented.

Anyway… Ellen found this very craftsman style porch light on sale for half off. The house, especially the porch, has enough craftsman design elements that if we keep using this kind of fixture, it will help to define that style. There are also matching sconce lights that we can use to replace the two lights on either side of the door, once we save a few pennies for them.

I removed the nasty old fan fairly easily. There was one stubborn screw in the old plate that took about half of the entire project time to get out. Mostly because I couldn’t find my vice grips. I really, really need to clear out the workshop area and get it organized so I can find stuff. And build that spice rack…

I reused the screws to hang the new plate, adjusted the chain length so that the light hangs higher than the top of the front door but can still be seen from the sidewalk, wired it up (used the old wire nuts as they were still in good shape) and mounted the light. I needed to do a little tweeking and twisting on one of the chain links to get the light to hang square to the porch and then I was done. I even reused one of the bulbs that was in the fan light fixture.

I can’t wait for tonight to see how it looks in the dark!