Sheet mulching, my way

This project began like most of my other projects. A little birdie plants an idea in my mind and I decide that I'd like to try it. In this case, we wanted less grass to mow and water, so sheet mulching sounded like the way to go. As usual, I started working on the project (we call this project 'buh-bye grass!') and then decided to read a bit about how to do it. Turns out (as often occurs) that I was doing it wrong. So I inform dedicated and forgiving husband about the change in plans, and we continue on with the project. After a day of work, I decide to read a little more and realize we are only doing it partially right. But that's okay, I tell myself, because we still have a lot more to go and we can see which of the three methods work the best. (I like to think of it as experimental landscaping. I've also created a method of pruning that I call 'wild animal pruning', but I'll save those lessons for another day.)

Here is a little peek at the work in progress:






Front view and side view. It used to be grass all the way up and through the cedars. R created a magnificent wave around the tree and he plans to continue that pattern across to the other, smaller tree. In the cedar gap, we plan to build an arbour to house our bench in, and create the perfect seating area for watching the many sports that get played what's left of the grassy field.






Also on the go is a project to put a path around the garden to the side gate. I took charge of the grass removal on this one and thought I did a fair job - until dedicated and forgiving husband called me over and informed me (with a hearty chuckle) that the start of my line was less then straight. Well, I'd had a little problem working in the tight space by the tomato towers... yes, I could have moved them but then that would have made sense.

And our final backyard project for this Spring:

Lovely garden patio. We will remove the stairs and create a patio in our little garden oasis. Build better stairs, give that poor window a good wash, and spend the rest of the summer enjoying our yard.

Well, when we aren't working on the front yard ;-)

A peek at our progress...

Slowly but surely, our family room is coming together. I say slowly because poor R has been away more then he has been home the past month, so weekends have been packed with sanding and painting and installing our floor to get to this point...

Ta-da! I'm so in love with this colour, even though it's not the original colour I picked out. I knew I wanted a green and I had a sample chip that I liked, but I really wanted to try the low VOC paint. When we got to the store, I couldn't find one that matched my chip so I picked something close and hoped for the best. I am not only pleased with the colour, but with the smell (or should I say lack of smell) with the low VOC paint. While painting there is a faint odour but it doesn't last long. Being so cold out, we couldn't leave the windows open (only slightly cracked while painting) and within a few hours, any odour of paint was gone. Since we still have pretty much the rest of our house to paint, I'm hoping to be able to match our colour (R doesn't want to change the main colour that runs through the house) and avoid the paint stink.

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R did the cork floors today and they look great! It feels very warm and earthy and it almost seems a shame to put the furniture back in and hide all of his hard work.

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All that's left to do is the trim, curtains and changing/adding lights... but it should be completed in time for our annual Christmas girls movie night!

Another weekend gone?

Well we woke up Saturday morning feeling kind of tired, and since we had something to go to in the evening we decided to put off our day of canoeing until Sunday. It's never fun to be out in nature when you have to be home at a set time for an evening out. Now I know that most people, when they are already tired might choose to spend the day relaxing in the yard, maybe puttering in the garden, playing ball with the kids or maybe going for a nice walk with the dog. ( or even say, getting to knit!!!) What did we do?
Cooked and froze pears from my neighbour.
Made the tomatoes on the left into more stewed tomatoes, ones on the right into more salsa.

Roasted tomatoes. I use them to make a sort of concentrated soup base which I freeze. The flavour of the roasted tomatoes is so intense that it is delicious served in many different ways.
I used a little of it for the Mexican style soup shown below. I just use some of the base, add broth, corn and garlic, then serve with avocado and tortilla chips. I like it even more with home-made garlic croutons but by that time I couldn't be arsed to do even one more thing.
Well maybe just one more thing...eat my fair share of pie. This is one of my favourite pies. It has ground walnuts on top of the crust under the plums and then it is topped with custard and baked. It is so good! We will be eating a lot of them over the next few weeks while our plums are ready.

While I was doing that. The guys were doing this.

Quite a bit of digging. A whole lot of shovelling fill off the truck into the wheelbarrows (my least favourite job). Some levelling and some brick laying. Most of this was done by S and the boys while I did the food preservation. Although I was the lucky one who got to do all the shovelling from truck to barrow and any other grunt work that needed to be done. W wants it known that he had to lift a lot of brick. I am looking forward to getting a chance to put plants in that new bed though. All in all a good day's work, although maybe not the way a normal person would choose to spend a day on which they were already tired...but I never said we were normal. No, not a bit.And this is how it looked just before dusk last night.

And this...this is Clipper, Clipper is not happy. We had promised to take her out for a dip, but Sunday turned out to be windy. If there is one thing that I am not fond of it is being in a little, bitty boat on a wavy, choppy lake with one large man and two small children. Not my idea of a good time. Poor Clipper.But I am happy because look what I got. Finally, finally, about two years after picking up this barrel that was marked free on the road side, I got me a rain barrel all hooked up to new downspout.

*I should mention that the reason this post has a frugality label is because we got all the bricks for this project for free (from a retail nursery close-out).

Where did the weekend go?

Some pictures of what we were up to this weekend.

We turned this nasty floor I posted about awhile ago

into this.

Even though I sometimes grumble about wishing that Mike Holmes would come and fix the rest of our house so that we didn't have to, it must be said that actually, my husband rocks when it comes to getting stuff done. Saturday morning we decided to cough up the extra $$ for cork flooring (it was on sale). We bought it and then I headed out to meet friends at the thrift store while S took the boys rock climbing. By the time I got home S was putting down the foam underlay and by bedtime we were done installing the flooring. When we do flooring the majority of the work goes to S and I am just the grunt labour. Sunday afternoon I painted the new baseboards that he had cut and he installed them last night. It looks lovely, he did a fantastic job on it. And come to think of it, he fills out a tank top rather nicely too, so really, who needs Mike. ;-) Besides he cooks too. Eggs Benny made with veggie ham and home made hash brown potatoes topped with peach tomato salsa

Here are Sunday's offerings from the garden.
I made this into stewed tomatoes to be used throughout the winter in soups, casseroles and stews. (I know that most people don't put zucchini in their stewed tomatoes but here anything that can have zucchini, does have zucchini) This was turned into more pesto to tuck away for winter.

E has been making bouquets of flowers for me and he made some for two of his favourite neighbours. So our poor, neglected canoe spent another weekend sitting in the yard, wondering when we would get around to paying it some attention. We have promised ourselves that next weekend we will take it out for a paddle and enjoy some time off in this gorgeous weather we are having. I guess I'll have to save the thrifting finds for another post.

Carpet woes.

Heather's handy home-reno tip #1. (actually my only home-reno tip)

If you are planning on ripping out the carpet in your bedroom Do Not be tempted to start it at 5 pm on a Sunday evening (especially if you have just come back from a holiday and are packing to go on another holiday, are kind of tired from yard work all weekend, and you were really just looking forward to a quiet evening with a nice dinner from the garden and a chance to catch up on some library books). Sure you might think it a simple job, just take off the baseboards and rip it out, right? But there is always the chance that underneath that manky, 34 year old carpet lurks an even mankier 34 year old underlay. That underlay might be old and tired and perfectly content to stay where it has been for the last 34 years. It might take a lot of coaxing to get it to move at all. Perhaps the adhesive that was used in underlay 34 years ago is CRAP and has broken down leaving the underlay as sad, multi-coloured foam chip bits all over your subfloor and the adhesive as disgusting gluey smears all over. (above is how the underlay should (sort of) look when it is not breaking down)

(above is how it looked over any areas of the floor that had been walked on for years)

The funny thing is that even though, because of the underlay, the job turned out to be a lot more work than I thought ( How many times have I read If You Give a Pig a Pancake? I know that is how this whole home reno thing goes and still I expect to be able to whip through a job like this in no time, will I never learn? It is never as simple as I think it will be.) we were even more thrilled that we did it once we saw how disgusting it was. I can't believe that we weren't sick from spending time sleeping in there when that was lurking under the carpet.

(scraped, swept and vacuumed and mostly ready to be finished, who knows when we will get to that)

Katherine, I have to tell you that I had planned to sit and relax last night but when I sat down to read, the book I chose was Green This! It was one that you had mentioned. Once I started reading it I didn't need any more motivation to rip the carpet out. :-) Books like that make me want to just get rid of everything in the house.

Yardwork in progress

Last week was devoted to making this side of our house a little more user friendly. I must admit that this photo was taken in 2004 and I could not find a more recent photo of what was known as 'The Side We Do Not Speak Of'. It had become a bit of a yard waste dumping ground and the last priority to get weeded.

R was lucky to have an eager young apprentice to assist him.

L quickly mastered the drill, as well as being a huge help with the banging in of the stakes and the moving of the dirt (all while rescuing many worms and relocating them to our compost)

Here is the almost complete stairs/ramp. It's not yet finished but it's where the excess dirt from our next yard projects will end up to fill in the stairs and finish the ramp. The sunflowers will stay there until I can collect the seeds to plant somewhere else next year.

Over the years, I've come to learn that everything can't be done at once and that the yard is a work in progress that will never quite be completed. I have been looking at all the projects we want to do and feeling overwhelmed - and feeling like we will never get them done! But while I was looking for the before picture of TSWDNSO, I realized just how much our yard has changed (mostly for the better) in the past 4 years. I realized it all takes time and I need to stop and enjoy my yard the way it is now, and not continually be looking at what needs to be done.

How to feel old. (Not!)

I don't listen to the radio too often, I tend to like the kind of music that they don't play on the radio anymore (at least not on any of the stations around here), plus I can't stand the commercials. Today I was working in the garage and decided to listen to the oldies station thinking that on Sunday they normally play a lot of fifties music and I was sure that I would get to listen to some Elvis tunes. Imagine my surprise and (temporary) delight when they played song after song from bands I had seen in concert when I was a teen. I heard Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, The Beach Boys, Trooper and Helix. If they'd played Billy Joel, Loverboy, Van Halen, Rick Springfield and a few other bands they would have pretty much covered most of my concert going days.

As I was singing along - and wielding my paintbrush in time to the music- it occurred to me that this was the oldies station - just to be clear, let me repeat that - the oldies station. The songs from my teenage years are now considered "oldies"? How can this be? One minute I was in school -happily going to concerts with music being an important part of my teenage life- then came college, a few years in Alberta, falling in love and getting engaged, a job transfer and bringing this man back to B.C with me (someone had to knock some sense into him), then marriage, another transfer (happily he came along again), buying a home, a child a few years later, another home, another child and ....wham...now I am an oldie. I can accept that some of the music that I grew up with could be considered oldies: Queen, The Stones, Burton Cummings, The Beach Boys, The Eagles. I guess I could see how some might think of those as oldies, but how on earth is Bryan Adams considered an oldie. When I think of oldies I think Elvis, The Temptations, Roy Orbison, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Willie and Waylon, Johnny Cash, you know?

Anyway I took my old radio out into the garden and spent the rest of the afternoon singing along and thinking about how strong music is, in that it can bring back memories you had all but forgotten. My Girl by Chilliwack came on and I remembered singing this in an in-concert (I don't know why, I just know we did), Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen reminded me that when I was ready to quit my piano lessons my mom made a deal with me that I could play whatever I wanted (she would arrange it with my teacher) if I just kept going and so she bought me a book of popular music that included some Queen. Do you remember American Pie? I remember belting this out with a group of girls at a birthday party in elementary school. What about Janis Joplin's Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, anything by Super Tramp, Bay City Rollers, Bee Gees (yes, I love them) and Abba? Or maybe Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall; we all loved the bit about "we don't need no education" , didn't that just seem so cool to you at a time when your life did seem controlled by teachers? I remember coming home from riding lessons singing along to Rhinestone Cowboy and that it was my favourite song when I was about 6 years old. I recall loving B.J Thomas' Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, Hooked on a Feeling, and (Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song and Burton Cumming's Break It to Them Gently. I still love to sing along to Me and Bobby McGee, most of John Denver's music or any Gordon Lightfoot songs.

I enjoyed listening to these songs so much then... and I still do now and it certainly made all my work in the garden just seem so much easier. It has reminded my how important music still is in my life and I will make a point of turning on some music more often. My folks had (still have) a jukebox and so I grew up with a lot of fun, old music in the house and I want this same appreciation of all kinds of music for my boys. And the paint brush that I was using when I started listening to the radio.... resulted in this screen door being finished.

Power Tools Have Entered the Picture...

Years ago we bought a bed. We did not pay a lot for this bed and it was my first lesson in 'You Get What You Pay For 101'. The workmanship was fairly shoddy, although it has held together pretty well with a little help from R. The stain job however, was atrocious. With a little inspiration from Martha, I decided to paint it 'antique style'. It was sanded, primed and painted - first with a tan colour, followed by a white colour. It looked pretty good white and I was tempted to leave it way but on closer inspection I realized if I did that, I would need to put on another coat of paint. That idea was vetoed and the delicate hand sanding (that Martha recommended) began. Slowly. I would do a small patch here and there. Then my arm would be sore and I would move onto something else. I was feeling discouraged - until I remembered my mouse sander! I knew this would get the job done quickly so out she came and two days later the job was done! I am very pleased with how it turned out. Now I just have to get the walls painted...

This is also turning into quite the time consuming job. The filling and sanding is going well, but I have to let it dry before I can sand it which takes time. I've been washing the walls and finding drips, bumps, etc left by the last people who painted. Although tempted to just paint over them, growing up with a perfectionist mother means this can't be done. I am sanding them down, even the ones that will be behind the bed. Like a wise (muscular, tank-top wearing) man once said, "Make it right!" And that is what I plan to do.