Kitchen Remodel At Warp Nine

June 23rd, 2009

When we bought the house last July, Holly and I knew that the fridge that came with it wasn’t long for this world. Every time the compressor on it wound down, it made a horrible thud - as if it were a 64.5-year-old factory worker plopping down on the recliner after another hard day’s work, just waiting for the moment when it could finally retire for good. Given the price of a new fridge, however, and all of the money we were spending elsewhere, we decided to ride it out until it died - since, after all, it was still serviceable in the meantime.

Unfortunately, the Saturday before last was its time.

We came home from our stained glass class (writeup coming on that shortly) around 2:00, and when we arrived back at the house, I headed for the fridge to find something to eat. The second I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I knew the fridge was dying - it was making a horrible, rapid-fire thud-thud-thud-thud-thud… noise, with metal obviously bending and warping with every thud. I called Holly over, told her we needed a new fridge, and the second she heard it, she agreed, and we headed off to Lowe’s.

Those who’ve read this blog for a while may wonder why we went there, and not good ol’ Home Depot. The answer is simple: while Lowe’s is more annoying to get to, we’ve found that their selection is better, their prices are lower, and their customer service is friendlier. Since a few extra minutes to get to the store didn’t matter much on a major appliance purchase, we decided to give them the money instead of those douchebags at the Home Depot.

The good news, in terms of shopping for a fridge on a must-buy-now sort of a basis, is that Holly had dragged me through the refrigerator section of every single stinking home improvement store we’d been to at least twice over the past year, so we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted. Within about an hour, we settled on the Samsung RF267ABRS, a 26 cubic-foot model complete with built-in filtered water/ice, chiller drawers with humidity control, digital temperature control, and - most interesting of all - a freezer on the bottom. This last feature makes a lot more sense than you might first think - since cold air falls, it’s more energy-efficient, and it also means that you’re not bending over to get to items in the fridge, which you access much more frequently than those in the freezer.

While we were there, we picked up a Samsung DMR78AHS dishwasher, to replace the 80’s vintage model we currently own (it’s quite literally the exact same model as the one that came with my parents’ house that was newly built in 1985). While the existing dishwasher still works, it doesn’t exactly do a great job, it’s obnoxiously loud (to Holly’s ears, anyway), and, like everything else that came with the house, I’m concerned it’ll die a horrible death at any minute. Since we got a $200 rebate for buying the two appliances together, it just made sense to go ahead and spend the money - especially since we also got 10% on the first purchase on our new Lowe’s card (which will hold the balance of the purchase for precisely the length of the six-month no interest, no payments deal we got).

With delivery scheduled for the next morning, we came home, and decided to start the world’s fastest kitchen renovation - seeing as how we’d already have the fridge moved out, we figured we might as well get it done while we were at it.

The first matter of business was measuring out the space our existing fridge sat in - while we’d taken a measurement of the fridge itself, we’d not expected to have a new one be quite so much larger, and we were hoping that we could just squeak in to the existing space. Of course, we weren’t so lucky - the new fridge, which is essentially the new standard size for refrigerators, was about an inch wider than the space we had. Given that we’re looking at redoing the cabinetry in the kitchen in the next year or two, we decided to just rip out what was sitting in the way…and in so doing, were treated to a spectacular display I like to call “Ugly Wallpaper Throughout The Decades”:

It’s almost as if we’re the first people with any kind of taste to ever own this house. How could you love any of those patterns? More importantly, how could you just leave them up, after that many kitchen remodels?

With those photos taken, we went ahead and moved the dying fridge out from the wall, so we could begin the process of stripping the last of the wallpaper from the room before painting. In the process, we discovered what may be the single most horrifying piece of electrical jimmy-rigging I’ve ever run across:

As Holly’s uncle pointed out while visiting this weekend, that’s actually paper tape around that wire join, not electrical tape. Given that the whole thing was pushed up against the wall - and that the wiring job was so bad that it zapped me every time I looked at it funny - it’s amazing it didn’t burn the house down years ago. Like my mother very aptly said, who the hell thought it was a good idea to hotwire a fridge?

Naturally, things got even worse once we got the wallpaper stripped. I’ve seen mold in kitchens before; it happens in hard-to-reach places, even with the cleanest of people. What I’ve never seen, though, is huge, multiple square foot-wide hunks of mold, clinging to the wall underneath rotted out, decades-old wallpaper. I think the only reason Holly and I didn’t die a horrible death breathing the stuff over the last year is that the paper kept it mostly in check - which, unfortunately, was no longer the case once we ripped it off.

The good news is, mold has a natural enemy that we’re quite friendly with: bleach. :-)

It was spectacular watching the walls turn from black and brown to white, all in a matter of seconds. Yeah, sure, we coughed a bit as we sprayed the bleach on the whole thing…but I guarantee we’ll be breathing better with that mold gone.

Working until well past midnight, we got the last of the wallpaper stripped, and the area behind the fridge primed with Kilz anti-mold primer. I set the alarm for 6 a.m., so that we could get up, slap on a coat of the sealant we’d recently used in the basement (which dries within a half-hour), and then paint, all before the delivery driver arrived - supposedly around noon.

When I called the delivery department at 8:00 a.m., as instructed by our salesperson, we ran into a snag: apparently we’d missed the cutoff for next-day delivery when we purchased, and the delivery trucks had already left the store (it turns out that the delivery manager arrives at 4:00 a.m. to start putting things together). While sympathetic to our plight - we were concerned that our fridge would die at any minute, taking everything inside with it - his drivers ran into other snags during the day that prevented him from having them get us the fridge on Sunday.

In the end, though, that ended up being a good thing: not only did it give us time to paint the entire kitchen before the fridge arrived (the dishwasher is still on back order), it meant that we got free installation on Monday morning, at 8:00 a.m. sharp. The delivery drivers hauled away our old fridge, and soon we had the beautiful new unit all set up and running:

Since then, we’ve installed new trim throughout, and replaced the knobs on our cabinets with free oil-rubbed bronze units Holly’s mother gave us (she got a ton of spares from an eBay auction she’d won). The kitchen looks amazingly better:

What’s really impressed me the most, though, is the fridge. The water and ice that come out of it are amazingly delicious - good enough that we can basically quit buying bottled water, which should save us a grundle of cash over the life of the fridge. The freezer-on-bottom concept is working much nicer than I expected, and the movable shelves inside the fridge are already proving useful. Surprisingly enough, though, it’s the humidity-controlled crisper drawers that are its best feature. While the Samsung rep at Lowe’s talked them up to no end, I figured it was just a marketing gig, and would leave my food soggy if anything. The reality, though, is that it, too, will save us money: I put in a half a bell pepper and a half an onion nearly a week ago after making some salsa, and they’re still fresh and crisp as I write this, as opposed to the wilted, close to mildewy state I would have expected in the old fridge. Even the celery I bought the day the fridge arrived is nice and fresh. With that sort of lifetime on fresh fruits and vegetables, we’ll be able to keep from throwing out a lot of good food - which, at the end of the day, is money in our pockets.

Was a major kitchen remodel conducted over the span of four days crazy? Yup. Did we spend a ton of cash on new appliances? Sure. But with the money we’ll save on electricity, water, and food, and all of the new features we get in the meantime - man, was it worth it!

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Opening A Pool The Hard Way

June 22nd, 2009

Given all of the cash I’ve had to lay down since buying this house - on everything from paint and wood trim to new windows and doors - I’m trying to save cash wherever I can. To that end, when we had a heat wave in late April, I decided I was going to skip paying the pros and open our pool myself this year. After all, Holly’s family always open their own pools, and I know lots of other people do; how hard could it be, I figured?

Yup, you guessed it: really hard.

Getting the cover off was pretty easy; we have a little allen wrench on a stick that will lower the pegs the cover hooks onto, and from there you just pull it off and fold it up. Sure, it’s a two-person job, but it’s pretty straightforward.

The next steps were pretty obvious: I had three plugs that I needed to put back in. Two of them went on the pump itself:

…and the third went at the base of the filter:

After attaching the pressure gauge to the top of the filter, I finished things off by screwing in the little cap near the top of the filter, and turning the switch on top of the filter from “CLOSED” to “FILTER”:

Excited to get things going, I flipped the switch…and was immediately disappointed. Instead of having the pressure gauge move up to around 10 psi, where it’s supposed to run, it blipped up to about 1…and then dropped back down to zero. Checking my intake valve, I could feel that it was sucking in water, and pumping it out the outflow, so I figured I might have just installed the gauge poorly, and let it run overnight.

By the next day, however, it was clear that something was wrong. Not only was the gauge still reading zero; the water hadn’t cleared a bit, despite the ton of shock I’d thrown into it. Meanwhile, the water pressure going in and out of the valves seemed lower than I’d expect - thought I still wasn’t sure if it was operating properly or not, since I hadn’t paid close enough attention last year to get a good feel on how hard it should be sucking.

Busy with a zillion other projects, I let the pool just run and do its thing for a couple of days, hoping it might improve on its own. Nearly a week later, I was still seeing bubbles come out of the outflow valve, with no real pressure; clearly things weren’t right. On the advice of one of my co-workers who owns a pool, I unscrewed the plug at the bottom of the filter while it was running - hoping that, like he suggested, it might clear the air out of the system by allowing it to escape through the base of the filter, as water pushed down from the intake valve above. Just like he suggested, I initially got air rushing out of the plug, followed by a trickle of water, and finally a stream. Thoroughly pleased that I’d been able to clear things up, I left the pump running, hoping for a speedy clearing of the algae and other assorted nasty still in the pool itself.

Frustratingly enough, by the next day the pressure on the system still had not risen, and there were no signs of improvement. At Holly’s suggestion, I set the filter to backwash, thinking that it might be full of junk from last season that had crusted up over the winter. After setting it on, I went back in the house for the evening, got involved in an other project, and promptly forgot about the pool. The next morning, when I remembered, I went out, flipped off the pump long enough to switch it back to filter mode, flipped it back on…and got nothing.

Horrified at the thought that I might have blown out my pump, and conceding to Holly’s concerns, I finally broke down and called up Pool Service Company, who have been the ones doing the servicing on our pool since before we bought the house. Unfortunately, since it was already May by that point, they were booked solid with openings, and it ended up being June before they could get someone out to our house.

When the technicians finally arrived, I described the situation, and they set to work determining what was wrong with the pump. Within minutes, they asked me who’d wired the switch the pump was sitting on. When I told them I had no idea, that I’d just inherited it with the house, the tech told me “Well, whoever it is, if I ever find them I’d like to beat them to death - this is the worst wiring job I’ve ever seen.” After flipping off the appropriate breaker, he spent 15 minutes and had the entire switch re-wired - and lo and behold, the pump worked again!

With that done, he also immediately determined why I’d had no pressure. Our pool comes with something called a guillotine valve…which no one had opened for the season!

Of course, this is no simple, obvious valve - oh no, not on my pool. I’d actually seen and fiddled with it previously, as it looked like it was probably important. Unfortunately, the little white plastic handle that you see sticking off the end of a long piece of metal on the right needed to be yanked - with a pair of pliers, no less - to get it open for the season, as did the valve on the left (which I currently have closed for reasons I’ll explain in a moment). I had gone as far as trying to unscrew things using that handle (it just screwed right off of the metal); seeing as how I’d never have yanked at something I didn’t understand, though, there’s no way I’d have ever figured it out on my own. Since those two valves control the flow of water in from the pool, having them closed is exactly why I was getting no water pressure.

Just to make things particularly entertaining, too, the two valves are logically backwards. If you’re in the pool, looking at the pump, you’ve got three pipes in the pool itself: one on the far left that is the return from the filter; one in the middle that’s got the basket for holding chlorine tabs; and one on the far right that’s for hooking up the vacuum hose. Since the guillotine valve is connected to the intake, it obviously has no impact on the return. With that in mind, we figured that the handle on the left would control the chlorine basket, and the handle on the right would control the vacuum hose intake. But of course, having the handle on the same side of the pool as the intake it controls would be just too easy for the people who’ve owned our house in the past, so the reality is backwards (which is why we’ve got the handle on the right open and the one on the left closed: we’re directing all the water through the chlorine tab-filled filter basket, to help clean things up faster).

With that taken care of, 18 pounds of baking soda tossed in to stabilize chemical levels, and a bunch of shock to boot, we soon saw a dramatic improvement in the condition of the pool: it went from scummy pond to light green pond. Frustratingly enough, though, we found that we couldn’t get it to move much further along than that, especially since the new vacuum hose we’d bought (the old one had the end that goes into the intake break due to age) didn’t seem to want to stick in the intake when we were vacuuming.

Irritated but resigned, last Thursday I called Pool Service Company back up to have them come out and just get the pool blue for us in time for our upcoming Fourth of July party. Meanwhile, I decided to redouble my efforts at cleaning the pool; on Thursday night I dumped 10 pounds of shock in, and when that did some good, put another 10 pounds in Friday night. The real game-changer, though, came when I found an unopened bottle of algaecide in the shed, and decided to toss the whole thing in.

Within minutes of putting the bottle in - which was about 5 times the recommended dose even for a green pool - the whole thing turned into a witches’ brew of frothing, bubbling, dying algae. By the next morning, we came out and were amazed to find that the pool had turned from green to blue!

Working over the weekend, we vacuumed several times (with one of us holding in the hose at the intake and the other vacuuming), and dumped in a bottle full of clarifier to help make the water less murky. As of this morning, the pool could use a bit more vacuuming, but is by and large blue and clear:

Unfortunately, though, we’ve not yet canceled the Pool Service Company visit that’s scheduled for today, due to a problem there’s no way we can fix - our vinyl liner is pulling away from the frame in multiple places:

I’m just hoping that they can repair the liner, since even a cheap replacement is ~$1,500 for just the liner itself…and heaven knows I don’t need to lay down any more cash on this place any time soon. :-P

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Attack of the Birds

June 22nd, 2009

Now that the massive chunk of concrete and stone in our back yard is gone, Holly and I got down to business late last week and got the last of our three pecans planted. Before doing so, though, I insisted that we get a picture with one of us standing in the middle of the hole, just to give a sense of scale to the whole thing:

The actual planting was actually easier than I expected, thanks to all of the rain we’ve had this year making things so soft and muddy; I had a 3-foot hole dug in around 15 minutes:

…and, before planting, even had a chance to pose with the plant in question, just to prove how ridiculously long its taproot really is:

In a development that surprised Holly and I not one iota, as I was digging the hole, I quickly attracted a visitor:


Worms? Yummy worms? Can haz worms?

What made things different from my normal robin encounters, though, was the cojones this one had. As I moved around the pit of dirt, turning in some of the peat moss we’d bought to help enrich the soil, he kept getting closer:

…and closer…

…and closer!

I think the robins are starting to plan some sort of sneak attack on me, as revenge for keeping them away from all of the freshly tilled worms. In fact, if you look closely at the large picture below (click to enlarge), you’ll even see the robin’s beak is open, ready to peck my eyes out!

I can only hope that the bats flying through the yard - who we just saw last night have returned for the summer - will protect me in the upcoming struggle against the robin hordes. That, and at least I can take solace in the fact that my lawn is safe from zombies:

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Edible Landscapes: Every Productive Plant Under The Sun, And Then Some

June 15th, 2009

As promised in a previous post, it’s time to write up the story of the trip Holly and I took last month to Edible Landscapes, who are quite possibly the country’s largest purveyor of plants you can eat.

Though they ship nationwide, we decided to go to their physical location in Afton, Virginia - both because we wanted to look at everything they had for sale ourselves, and because we wanted a pawpaw tree larger than they could ship (anything in a pot above 5 gallons must be picked up on-site). It’s a trek of about three hours from Arlington, down into the center of the state; we quite literally went to Charlottesville (home of the University of Virginia), hung a right, went a few more miles, and then turned off onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Its location was a great sign; after all, the more remote a plant seller is, the more likely they are to have a huge chunk of land to grow their wares.

Edible Landscapes was no exception to that rule: they’re spread out over several acres of pastoral rolling hills, with selections stretching as far as the eye can see. In fact, they’re so big that when we got out of our car, we were initially concerned about finding what we wanted. Our worries didn’t last long, though, as we were immediately greeted by a man who introduced himself as part of the staff, and offered to help us find anything we were looking for.

Our guide was, well, the prototypical hippie: his hair hung in loose dreadlocks around his face; he dressed in khaki shorts, Birkenstocks, and some sort of wood/shell necklace; and he stank like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t just a metaphorical “dirty hippie” stink, either: the man reeked, like he hadn’t taken a bath in weeks. The odor was so foul that I stood no closer than 10 feet from him at any point in time, with Holly following another 10 feet behind me in the hopes that I might absorb some of the smell before it came in and assaulted her nostrils. It would have driven us away immediately if he hadn’t been so dang friendly…and useful, for that matter.

After we picked out our pair of pawpaw trees - snagging the very last 3-gallon mango pawpaw in stock - we snagged a catalog and started hunting out other cool things to buy. We soon settled on a pair of kiwis - a Meyer’s Cordifolia and a generic male (which is can pollinate 5 or 6 females on its own) - in 3-gallon buckets. We’ve yet to plant them, due to construction work we’re looking to do near the spot we’ve selected (we’re demolishing the concrete pad our swing sits on in favor of a smaller stone pad we’ll put in afterwards); even so, they’ve been so happy growing away in their pots that one of them was actually sending out vines to climb the nearby grass.

Part of the reason we went with the kiwis - besides the obvious cool factor of “you’re growing kiwis in Virginia?” - was the grove of kiwis they had growing on-site (we’ll get a picture next time we go down; unfortunately we’d forgot to bring our camera). For anyone who’s wondering, yes, grove really is the appropriate word: they’d planted two rows of kiwis about five feet apart, and trained them such that the vines grew together to form a canopy about 6 feet above the ground (the kiwis got to a height of probably 10 feet). You could literally walk through a tunnel of kiwis, likely picking fruit as you go later in the summer. Though we don’t have enough space to replicate that sort of awesome, we will be building a pergola for our two kiwis to grow up, with the intent of reproducing the kiwi grove on a smaller scale.

After much debate about budget, yard size, and selection, the only other plant we came away with during that visit was a 1 gallon English black currant, which will apparently grow just fine down here in the ol’ colonies. Seeing as how it already had little green berries on it, we were pleased with the selection - and are looking forward to making jam with the berries later on this year and giving some to Holly’s British immigrant grandparents, just for the sheer irony of it all.

The entire purchase came out to roughly $200, $50 of which was offset by a tree planting grant from our neighborhood civic association (there are some distinct benefits to living in such a tree-hugging neighborhood). Given the quality of the plants we got - all of them are thriving, and I expect fruit production within a couple of years on the pawpaws (and hopefully sooner on the kiwis) - and the exceptional service we had, with our hippie friend running around the entire property looking for just the right plants, I would strongly recommend Edible Landscapes to anyone interested in putting a delicious twist on their garden. Where else are you going to be able to pick up such awesome plants?

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Backyard Archaeology

June 15th, 2009

Over Memorial Day weekend, Holly and I drove down to visit her family in Tennessee and Alabama. Among the many things we did down there was digging up 11 wild pecan saplings from my mother-in-law’s old house, which she’s currently in the process of selling. After the 700+ mile drive back up from Athens, Alabama, the saplings sat in pots for over a week, due to uncooperative weather and other work that kept us away from gardening.

Convinced that we had to get at least some of the saplings in the ground before they died in the pots - one of the larger specimens has a 3-foot taproot, and we had to swirl it around the pot in order to get the entire root under the ground - we broke down and got out in the rain with the shovels, determined to get the pecans planted rain or shine. We measured out exactly where we wanted to plant - we’re doing a row of three spaced 10 feet apart from each other, 10 feet off the back fence, and 15 feet off the side fences - picked the plants, and put a shovel in the ground.

THUNK!

Wow, that’s a big rock, I thought. Stopped the shovel clean. Backing up a few inches, I put the shovel to the ground, set up for a good solid scoop, and…

THUNK!

Geez, I’ve got a boulder on my hands! Let me get even further back…

THUNK!

After roughly 10 minutes of exploration, we’d come to a startling conclusion: the boulder that I initially thought we’d found was actually a huge slab of stone. The good news, though, was that the stone had clear seams in between pieces, which meant that it ought to be easy to dig out. Within a few minutes, we’d dug out the stone that sat where we wanted to put the center pecan tree, and were ready to dig its hole. I put my shovel back into the muddy water, and much to my surprise…

THUNK!

My irritation transitioned into an incoherent stream of curse words at that point. There we were, standing in the pouring rain, mud everywhere, trying to plant a dying pecan…and there was another rock. What the hell?

After much digging, and pulling another stone nearby out of the ground, we came to a horrifying realization: it wasn’t just another rock under the first one we’d pulled up; it was actually concrete. Realizing that we weren’t getting that pecan planted, and that we didn’t have the light left to try to plant either of the other pecans, we headed inside, determined to come back the next day to figure out what was going on.

As has been happening across North America this year, we ran into - you guessed it - more rain the next night when we went out to try again. Undeterred, we started by poking the shovel into the ground at two-inch intervals, until we’d established the approximate size of the chunk of rock: a rectangle about 6 x 15 feet wide, somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 square feet.

The good news was that the two pecans that were getting planted on the sides of the one we’d tried to put in first were going outside this pad. This was particularly helpful, since I’d picked up more dead fish to use as fertilizer the night before - and they’d spent the day sitting in our vestibule, since we didn’t want their stench befouling the contents of our refrigerator or freezer overnight. With the rain pouring down on us, I set my shovel to the first site, pushed down, and wedged out my first shovelful of mud. I’d love to spell out the sound it made for you, but I just can’t find the letters that appropriately convey the waterlogged sucking noise that the ground made as I pulled the dirt out; it was the sound you’d expect out of a deranged bloodsucking creature of the night, with the volume turned up to 11.

Thankfully, I was able to dig deep enough holes to plant both of the side pecans without disturbing whatever creatures may lie beneath…and put the fish into them without vomiting, a major accomplishment considering both their overpowering stench and the slimy texture they were developing as they began to decompose in the vestibule. If nothing else, it seemed oddly appropriate to consign these fish to a pair of very watery graves.

The bad news we discovered that evening was the extent of our problem with the stone. Not only was there concrete underneath it, as I’d discovered the night before; that concrete went six inches down, underneath the flagstone (looking at what we’d dug up already, it was clearly decorative stone of some sort). It was readily apparent that we wouldn’t be able to simply dig the whole thing up, especially since the stones were attached to the concrete; we figured we’d need a jackhammer to get the whole thing out.

After my last experience using outdoor power tools in the back of the yard - that whole pesky chainsaw incident - I decided that it would be the better part of valor to pay someone else to dig all this mess up, and posted to our neighborhood mailing list seeking a contractor. We had several replies within just a few days of my posting, and I quickly settled on one of them based on the person the recommendation came from. Calling him up last Monday, he agreed to send someone out to give me an estimate that afternoon.

By that evening, no one had come; given that it was pouring rain most of the day, though, I thought little of it. The next morning, I got an apologetic call, saying that someone would be out that day. This cycle was rinsed and repeated until Thursday afternoon, at which point I called up the contractor and told him that if someone wasn’t sent out that night, I’d have to go elsewhere (a valid threat, considering that the stock I was selling to pay for the job would be unavailable for sale until well into August following the close of business the next day, due to SEC rules on insider trading).

Amazingly enough, someone appeared - just like magic - within an hour, eager to take a look. I brought him back and showed him the area in question; after hemming and hawing a bit, he told me that he could do the job for $1,800. When I choked and repeated that figure, he said the best he could do it for would be $1,500, since he’d have to get a pneumatic jackhammer back in to get it all up. I told him thanks, that I’d have to think about it, and that I’d get back to him.

Now consigned to the horror of getting up nearly 100 cubic feet of concrete and stone myself, I spent the rest of the evening working on minor projects inside. At 9:30, much to my surprise, there was a knock on the door - and a pair of men saying they were ready to give me an estimate on my concrete removal. Figuring that a second opinion wouldn’t hurt, I led them into the back yard with a flashlight.

Talking to them on the way back, it was clear that one of them was the brains and the other the brawn of the operation. After showing them the dimensions, the following conversation ensued:

Brawn: “Well, someone else might quote you $600-700 to get this out…”
Brains: (quietly) “…and that’d be a real low price…”
Me: “Mmmm hmmm…” (deliberately not mentioning the earlier $1500 estimate)
Brawn: “But I could get it done for you for, oh, $450. That’s for hauling stuff off, too.”
Me: (excited) “When can you come out?” :-)

So just like that, I had a contractor - scheduled for today, no less.

As I write this, the two men have just finished up the pad, after about four and a half hours worth of solid sledgehammering, prying out flagstone from concrete, hauling away concrete, and stacking stone near our pool, all on a hot, sunny day here in the swamps of DC. Have I mentioned how wonderful it is to be able to pay someone else to do manual labor like that, even if it is only once in a while?

UPDATE: Now that my camera is back from the shop, I present for your enjoyment (and appreciation of scale) - first, the stack of just flagstone pulled up by these contractors:

…and the hole they dug out:

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Going Native With Pawpaw Trees

May 19th, 2009

After cutting down our maple tree recently, Holly and I were eager to get replacement trees in - it was, after all, the only tree on our entire property, and it left a big ugly hole in the ground. We agreed early on that the trees we put in should bear fruit - as Holly says, I’m stripping out every ornamental I can get my hands on in favor of a productive plant - but we were uncertain about exactly what sort of fruit we should go with. Apples? Cherries? Something more exotic? There were a lot of things to consider.

While at some local neighborhood plant sales a couple of weekends ago, we asked around, and had several people suggest pawpaw trees. The case for them was pretty solid: they produce a fruit that’s like a cross between a mango and a banana (which was apparently George Washington’s favorite dessert when served chilled) that’s not readily available in stores, and which can cost $4 each when found there. Equally important, they’re native to the region - word has it that the development that became Douglas Park was actually a pawpaw grove that was cut down to make room for the houses - which means that they should thrive with minimal care in our yard.

We were able to pick some up at Edible Landscapes - a process which will get its own post shortly - and this weekend, after finally clearing all of the mulch from our maple, we set about planting them. Step one, of course, was to dig the hole for our Mango Pawpaw - a process which ended up revolving less around dirt than maple roots.

Now, I’m no wimp when it comes to digging out really ridiculous roots:

…especially when I can get the reciprocating saw to help out (there really is nothing like the smell of smoking maple root in the morning ;-) ). I am, however, a total wimp when it comes to digging out what essentially amounts to stone masquerading as roots, especially when it’s as big as my forearms:

Step two, which was occurring in parallel time, was a bit less conventional: it involved procuring fish which had, well, ceased to be. You know, ones which were no more…yet were still completely intact. Apparently it’s a difficult thing to procure a whole dead fish around these parts - Holly had to go to M. Slavin & Sons, a local seafood store, after making trips to two local supermarkets that came up short. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise - it’s not like I would ever buy a whole fish to eat - but seeing as how it’s not something you think about often, it still came as a surprise that it wasn’t just in the store.

Thanks to this local shop, however, we were in good shape for both holes:


::Sniff:: We barely knew ye, my stinky friends. Fare thee well.

So why, you ask, did I have Holly go to three stores just to get whole fish? Fish that smelled so atrociously that the stench could walk across the yard and hit you in the face?

As it turns out, the last time I planted a tree was the peach tree in the back of my parents’ yard in Sacramento, way back in 1986 or so. As an elementary school-aged child, I remembered my teachers suggesting that a dead fish be planted in with a tree, for nutritive purposes (apparently the Native Americans suggested this to the early settlers); when that peach was planted, we did as suggested, and it seemed to work very well. Seeing as how these trees were facing a less-awesome growing environment than that peach, it seemed like a good idea to confer every advantage we could.

For those who might be interested in planting their own trees, I’ll take a moment to note what other things went into these holes (which were about twice as deep and half again as wide as the planters the trees came out of). First was a layer of peat moss, which is loose for easy root growth and retains moisture, to help wick away water in times of excess moisture and let it back out when things are dry. That was followed by several shovels of dirt from my back yard, which is full of worms; if you’re not so lucky, I suggest buying a few from a bait shop. The tree itself was in topsoil when it came out of its planter, and the whole thing was filled in with a combination of the dirt from the hole I’d just dug and my back yard dirt, which is also quite more rich than the clay-filled front yard stuff. On top of the level hole, I put fresh grass clippings - rich in nitrogen and cheaper than a regular fertilizer - and finally a small pile of fresh maple chips, to help retain moisture and prevent weeds. Note that hardwood mulch will leech nitrogen, so it’s best to make sure that some source of nitrogen is readily available to any plant you mulch.

As I was finishing up planting the first tree, I noticed that I had a visitor - Mr. Robin Red-Breast, as Holly likes to call them:

That eager look you see in this robin’s eye isn’t just your imagination, either. He’s only got one thought running through his head in that picture:

Worms? Worms? Yummy worms? Mmmm, worms…

The robins have actually taken to following me whenever I head to the yard with a shovel, because they know that no matter how hard I try to protect any worms I dig up…well, they’ve got an easy meal coming. It’s simultaneously hilarious and frustrating to watch them as they inch ever closer to me and my shovel, thinking of nothing more than eating my succulent, juicy, delicious wooooooorms:

<zombie voice>Woorrmmss!!!! Woooorrrrrrmmmmmssss!!!!</zombie voice>

Err, sorry about that. Got carried away with the worms. Must be something about the hunger in the robin’s eyes. That, and, well, the fact that he didn’t go away as I was taking a picture of the mango pawpaw:

He must have had his fill by the time I got the native wild pawpaw, though:

After finishing up the planting - and digging out a light pole that’s never worked since we bought the house - we had completely transformed out front yard, for the better:

Now we just have to wait for the pawpaws to start producing. :-)

Posted in Gardening, House | 1 Comment »

More Fun Than Watching Paint Dry

April 24th, 2009

One of the projects that’s kept Holly and I so busy lately is stripping doors for our hallway - four of them, to be precise. While each one is different in terms of how much crud we have to get through before reaching the actual wood, they’ve all been a lot of work, and very rewarding once we’ve actually cleaned them up and finished them off.

One thing we’ve learned during this process, for anyone who might be contemplating a project of their own in the same vein: if you can, avoid doors that have been previously stained like the plague.

I don’t know if modern stain’s chemical composition is any different, or if it’s just the process of aging that causes it, but old school stained doors are nasty. Oh, sure, they look innocent enough when you’re starting out:

…and to the untrained eye, they may not even look so bad as you’re actually stripping them:

It’s just that, well, they leave a trail of toxic slar - a new word I’m coining to describe the sort of sludge/tar mess that even our extra-hardcore stripper chemical turns into once it comes into contact with too much old stain. If you wanted to make this stuff at home and you didn’t have several decades to wait while the stain ages, I’d suggest mixing the following ingredients:

  • 2 cups fresh snail slime
  • 1 cup molasses
  • 2 tablespoons black engine grease (for color)
  • 1/4 teaspoon superglue (thickening agent)

That should give you something that approximates this awful slar. Looking at what it did to our steel brushes - even after our best efforts to keep them clean by scraping, wiping, and coating them in mineral spirits - reminds me of one of those “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” commercials:

That said, even this kind of nasty can be worth it sometimes once you clean the door off - there really is some beautiful grain on these old doors:

One piece of the door-stripping puzzle that’s been particularly amazing to watch, though, is the way the stripper works on paint. I’ve already posted pictures of it in action; to truly do it justice, though, takes video. Luckily, I actually remembered to make a movie of it in action (4MB MPEG) on our previous door. Anyone watching it, make sure to get at least 35 seconds in before you give up - it starts out slow, but it gets rather amazing after that point in the video.

Stripping, staining, and hanging doors has become such an integral part of my home life these days that I’m not sure I’ll know what to do once we’re done. Of course, if Holly has her way, that won’t be for a long time - because even though we’re close to finishing the stripping process on the last door for the hallway, she’s already eying the two remaining closet doors upstairs, and the four doors downstairs. What would I ever do without such an ambitious wife?

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Taking Down Our Maple Tree

April 24th, 2009

After our tree-pruning exercise in the back yard resulted in me getting six stitches - due primarily to me not really knowing how to handle a chainsaw - Holly and I decided that we needed to call in some professionals to get rid of the maple tree in our front yard (whose roots were so close to our house that they were in serious danger of destroying our foundation). Several estimates later, we settled on Northern Virginia Tree Experts, whose estimate was by far the lowest we’d received, and who were willing to give an additional 10% discount for the group of people in our neighborhood who were arranging tree work at the same time.

NVTE was pretty quick about scheduling us up once we got in a signed copy of their estimate; in fact, I did so on a Friday, and they scheduled me for the following Tuesday. That morning, Holly went out and took one final picture of the tree:

We both felt a little sad about it coming down, but we knew it had to go - maple roots are notoriously aggressive invaders, and it was just too close to the house to let it stay in place.

Around 11:00 a.m., the NVTE folks showed up, and after asking me to move the Mini even further away from the house (I’d put it on the street near the property line with my neighbor), began work. It wasn’t long before I realized why they’d been able to put in an estimate so much lower than the other companies: their guys are insane.

I had anticipated them coming in with a cherry picker and lots of safety equipment, given that the tree was probably 30 feet tall or so. Instead, one of the three people on-site simply climbed up into the tree, attached himself to it with a pair of ropes, and started chainsawing away:

It was pure craziness - for heaven’s sake, his chainsaw was attached to his belt, and he just let it dangle when it wasn’t in use!

What was even crazier, though, was watching the tow-behind wood chipper they had brought along with them. The stream of wood chips flying out of its exhaust end was spectacular:

But to truly do it justice, you need to see it in action. Thankfully, my digital camera has a handy-dandy video recording mode - and while it’s not the best quality video ever taken, this is 15MB worth of an MPEG you just have to see. That machine literally chewed through 10 foot branches in under a minute!

The whole experience was just mesmerizing; I stood outside and watched the vast bulk of their work, all the way down to seeing the crazy guy up in the tree reeeeeeaaaaaaach to get the last branch off the top:

The most safety-oriented thing they did the whole time was use some extra rope to help pull down some of the higher-up branches - and even that was not exactly a finesse job (3MB MPEG).

Still, I couldn’t complain, because in under an hour’s time, they had reduced the tree all the way down to a stump:

The hardest part of the entire job appeared to be slicing up the trunk into pieces small enough that they could haul them into the wood chipper:

NVTE was really good about accommodating my requests during the cutting process, too. Not only did they agree to leave all of the chipped-up tree in our driveway (we’re going to be spreading it under our deck as an anti-weed layer); the crew leader took a look at the deck to help me decide if I wanted the full truckload of mulch, and was able to slice off a chunk of the trunk for us to keep (Holly wants to turn it into a table of some sort):

They wrapped up the entire project in about an hour and a half, or roughly 937,482 times faster than I’d have been able to do it myself (excluding removing the stump, which NVTE apparently subcontracts out to some other group who’s going to be coming at a later date). If I had any trees left on my property, I’d be sure to hire them for any future maintenance work!

Of course, the aftermath of all of this is the pile of mulch they left. My next-door-neighbor Alice - who, despite having been born during the Coolidge administration, is still working for the Washington Post - came over just as I was coming back out of the house to assess the pile, asking what my plans for it were (as an avid gardener, the lust in her eyes for fresh hardwood mulch was unmistakable). After explaining our plans for the deck and offering to share a few wheelbarrow loads worth, we both took a moment and contemplated the sheer ridiculous size of the pile - which ended up leaving us both chuckling. Ever friendly, she agreed to stand next to the pile for a frame of reference while I took a picture (she’s about 5′2″):

The really scary part is just how much work it’s going to be to get rid of the pile. First, we have to take the massive pile of dirt that’s been sitting in my back yard since August and shovel it out appropriately under the deck to fill in the random holes (or, as they’re better known to Holly and I, mosquito orgy centers) and slope things away from the house. Only then do we get to spread the mulch out under the deck - a scary thought when you realize that we’re already more than 30 wheelbarrow loads of mulch in and we’ve barely dented the pile.

Make no mistake, people: if you don’t own a home, and you think maintenance will be easy, think again. My only consolation is that, by the time Holly and I finish transforming the yard, it’ll be spectacular - after all, how many people have a ~500 square foot deck with grill/dry bar/outdoor seating, a pool, five major varieties of berry bush, a fig bush, a vegetable garden, pecan trees, roses, a vegetable garden, and a covered swing?

Posted in Gardening, House, Product/Service Reviews | No Comments »

It’s All A Façade

April 24th, 2009

First off, to all who’ve been anxiously awaiting updates to this blog, my apologies for the recent lack of posts; things have been crazy here, and I’m going to try to clear some of the backlog of posts I’ve got to write over this weekend. That said, on to today’s post.

This past weekend, Holly and I were on our way back from the architectural salvage warehouse we’ve been frequenting of late (which will get a post of its own shortly), and in the middle of the ghetto of DC we noticed a store with a sign advertising a major sale on stools of all kinds. Since we’ve been looking for a good pair of outdoor chairs to sit at the dry bar out on our deck, we decided to give the place a shot - after all, it was broad daylight, and store owners in the ghetto usually like white customers with money.

We’re glad we stopped; as it turns out, our assumptions about the store were rather naïeve. The place has been family-owned in that location since before that neighborhood was torn apart in the riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, and the sale was because the owner was finally moving the store to a different location and wanted to clear as much inventory as possible. Within just a few minutes, we’d found a pair of really nice chairs on a 50% off sale - which made them roughly the same price as the cheap, ugly, cliché alternatives at Wal-Mart and Home Depot. The coup de grâce came when the owner, obviously desperate for a sale, dropped the price another 10% without us even starting to haggle with him, preëmpting our discussion over price; at that point, we snapped them up and brought them home:

Sure, they look nice and all, but I’m sure you’re asking yourself: why did he choose such a mundane thing for his first post in almost a month? And why on earth does he keep using accent marks when talking about this new piece of décor?

The answer is simple, really: it’s all about the tag that came with the chairs.

At a quick glance, the tag was nothing special; it had a company logo straight out of the 80’s

…and a list of features and benefits provided by these chairs. Much like the ratty exterior of the store we bought them at disguised the high-quality chairs being sold inside, though, the typical corporate layout of the text on the tag was merely a façade hiding something completely different underneath. In this case, though, the reality was far worse than the initial impression - unless we’re measuring quality by the unintentional comedy scale.

Going down the feature/benefit list, Holly quickly noticed:

“B. T-Nut Construction: Eliminstes Wood Screw”

Whoa! I guess their copy writing team is as stuck in the 80’s as their logo design group - you know, back in the day when spell check was the exception, not the rule. At that point, we immediately began reading the rest of the tag, looking for more things to poke fun at - and were rewarded very quickly:

“F. Cushicning: Polyurethane Foam of various Densities for Maximum Comfort, Durability and Lasting Shape”

Geez! It’s like they’re asking for someone to do an exposé on the lack of quality in copy writing! It hurts me just to type that!

The really sad part, though, is that these two lines were like simple hors d’œuvres leading up to the main course of grammatical failure that was the last line in this column:

“G. Powder Coating: Resists Scuiffing Péeling, Chipping under Heavy Use”

Péeling? Péeling? What the heck is Péeling? Is that like the snooty French version of peeling, where things come off in little cheese-like slices ready to go onto a cracker? Or is it the palæontological version of peeling, since the pronunciation would be pay-eh-ling?

The earlier misspellings I can understand; they’re probably just the result of simple laziness. What I want to know is, how the heck do you go to all of the trouble of creating an accented character - no small feat in an English-based word processor - where it doesn’t belong, and then not bother hitting the shift key for “under” (or tossing in the comma between “Scuiffing” and “Péeling”, for that matter)? Were they just trying to prove that no one ever reads these tags? Or were they, like a heartbroken Romeo, about to be banishèd from their job, and looking to take out one last bit of revenge on their employer?

It’s one of those mysteries of the universe we may never have an answer to. At least it gave me an excuse to go find a list of English words with accent marks and play with them - not something you get to do every day. :-)

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All-American Fencing

April 1st, 2009

One of the things Holly and I have known would need taking care of since we bought the house was the fence around our back yard. Not only was it unsightly in a number of places, it was actually falling down - quite literally - along the side where our neighbors have large dogs, and one of the two gates crumbled to the point that it couldn’t be latched over this winter. What’s kept us from doing the fence for these past 9 months, though, has been price: with a chunk of yard that’s 50 feet wide and 100 feet deep, even regular pressure-treated wood panels at Home Depot would have run us some $1,500, let alone the fact that composite panels (which are designed to last at least 20 years) would have been over twice that. Since buying bare boards and doing the whole thing ourselves would have taken weeks, if not months, to do, I’d been avoiding the project like the plague.

With spring rolling around here, though, Holly was getting more and more concerned about the liability issues involved with not having the fence up to code - apparently, the way the law across the US is, if you own a pool and don’t properly fence it off, you’re liable if someone drowns in your pool even if they were trespassing, because it’s considered an “attractive nuisance.” While at a home and garden show a few weeks ago, we got a couple of different fencing companies to agree to come do an estimate, to see what they could put it together for.

As it turned out, the guys from both companies ended up in our back yard at the same time, despite them having been scheduled for 2.5 hours apart. It was an awesome sight to watch as the two glared at each other, both obviously hungry for the business - and even better when the guy from Long Fence, one of the major fencing companies in DC, dropped his original price by over $300 after realizing how direct his competition was. Even with that price drop, though, he still came in at $400 above the estimate from A&A Fence, a local company who was offering the style we wanted at that lower price - which made our choice of contractors really easy.

Given that both estimates were in the range of several thousand dollars to replace the entire fence, we ended up just having the back fence row - which was the worst offender in terms of falling apart - and the busted gate replaced, while the leaning side with the dogs would have its posts re-set and be re-attached (as the boards themselves were in good shape). While that much work only came in at $100 less than the materials if we were doing the entire thing ourselves, we decided it was worth having it done professionally, both because that was all that really needed to be done, and because that way someone else could pull permits, ensure it was to code, etc.

This past Monday was the big day, and we were both eagerly awaiting the arrival of the contractors (I was telecommuting, and it was Holly’s every-other-Monday-off day). By 8:00 a.m., I’d been told to expect the crew by about 9:00; predictably, by 10:30, they weren’t yet there (I’ve yet to find a contractor in the entire world who’s always on time). At around 10:45, we had someone finally show up - but he was just delivering materials, and wanted to know where he should put them. After a frustrated call to A&A’s dispatch center, I was assured that the crew had simply wanted to avoid morning traffic coming in towards the city, since they were confident they could knock out the job in a matter of a couple of hours, that they’d be there within the hour, and that I should just have the delivery guy leave the materials on my front lawn.

With no other real choice - it’s not like I had much of a place to put several pallets of boards and bags of cement - I had the delivery guy drop things in my yard, and prepared to chew out A&A if their guys weren’t there by noon. Much to my surprise, however, a crew of three workers arrived around 11:30; to my complete lack of surprise, they were all Mexicans (or Salvadorians, or some other type of Latin Americans), who spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. While I was initially a bit concerned about the possibility of the fencing company having just hired cheap day laborers, the head of the crew was very professional as he went over what was to be done with me, and following that, they immediately set to work, and had removed the entire 50 feet of fence from the back in roughly 30 minutes:

Even more amazing was how fast the new fence went back up - this picture was taken a half-hour after the one above:

When I saw the new fence going up so quickly, my worries about shoddy work re-surfaced. The reality of it, though, is that they just had great tools (including an awesome nail gun), were well-organized, and knew what they were doing; when Holly and I walked out to take a look, it was quite clear that they were doing the job right. In fact, the new fence is so stable that you can walk along the top of it, as one of the workers proved while installing caps on the posts:


Close-up of the installed post caps

In addition to having the entire job done in three hours, the crew actually went above and beyond what had been originally quoted to us: instead of simply resetting problem posts along the side fence, they actually installed new ones; instead of putting in a gate with one hinge like what we’d had, they put in a double-hinged gate with an extremely sturdy latch mechanism:

The finished product was so nice that we made a point to compliment the crew for a job well done as they were wrapping up, and told them that we’d gladly recommend them to our neighbors. Upon hearing that, the head of the crew whipped out a business card, and told Holly that they were actually branching out on their own, but still doing work for A&A until they got going. While the card read “R & P Fencing”, Mr. Vidal, the head of the crew, was quick to mention that he’d just changed the business name, and his new cards hadn’t come in yet.

“What’s the new name?” asked Holly.

“All-American Fencing,” came the reply, without - as she tells it (I was inside at the time) - even a hint of irony from Mr. Vidal.

We both had a good laugh at the irony of the name at first, but then we thought about it a bit, and realized that it’s actually a very appropriate name. After all, this crew is clearly living the American dream: clearly first-generation immigrants, they’ve come to this country to work and make a better life for themselves (and presumably their families), and are succeeding by being good at what they do. With that reality in mind, and the clear pride that Mr. Vidal has in the concept of being an American…well, I’m not only happy to recommend them to my neighbors, I’m pleased to call them fellow Americans.

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