Back: Broken

Fall is undoubtedly my favorite time of year. But the impending months of cold and rain lit a fire under my butt to get outside and finish up some projects.

First up, I painted our previously white door black. Behold the transformation!
***Note that the house is being painted grey soon, so ignore the tan siding.

Before

After

Next up was probably the most exhausting and horrifically tedious project of my life: the garage door. Just typing those words is upsetting to me. So this door is aluminum, and whoever painted it originally did a piss poor job, because the paint was chipping everywhere. We knew we'd have to get all loose paint off of this thing, prime it, then repaint it. Here's the deal... It peeled like crazy, but was surprisingly difficult to strip. After maybe 12 total hours of me scraping at this thing with a metal edge, we thought to try a power washer. Prepping involved hanging a tarp around the door on the inside of the garage like so:

Nevertheless, lots of water still made it in. No big deal though. Thankfully, the day we power washed was almost 80 degrees... a strangely Summer-y Fall day, which normally I hate but not when soaking wet. The washing took a few hours, but was pretty effective. It removed about 85% of the paint, good enough. A few days later I primed with a rust-inhibiting paint, then painted a few days later.

Action shot of power-washing. Drenching wet underwear/shirt/shorts and paint chips covering every square inch of skin not pictured.

Primed...

And painted!

It needs one more coat of paint, and soon we'll be adding faux strap hinges to give it that carraige door look.
***Also, you can see paint samples in the last pic. Those are our grey samples for the house. We're going with the top grey, in case you're curious. But more on that in the coming months...

The back-breakingest part of this update was when I tackled the front flower beds. They were utter messes. Crappy dirt, tons of weeds. But no longer! In the weeks prior, I have moved old plants to their new homes around our yard, weeded, edged, pruned. Two weeks ago I finally laid weed cover and mulch!
***Future plans include adding decorative edging, transplanting the canna (left side) and roses (right side) elsewhere, and replace them with 2 rhododendrons on each side with annual flowers up front.

Left side before.

Right side halfway done. Cardboard was laid and soaked to help kill existing grass, then I laid weed cover.

Right side with weed cover finished.

Garage walkway flower bed before.

Left side after. There's those paint samples again!

Right side after.

Garage walkway after. Spring bulbs (crocus and daffodils) are also planted here.

Next up: Painting the house grey, installing the black shutters we ordered months ago, installing the strap hinges on the garage door, and more flower bed work.

I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween! Love, Coach Taylor and Tami Taylor.

The Woodchip Pile

At some point in late August, PGE left us a note that they needed access to our backyard trees. They would trim them around their wires at no cost to us, and would even provide free woodchips if so desired! We like free, so we said yes.

Oh my the god, the pile they left us... James pulled up in his car just as they were leaving and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. How in the hell would we ever use all of this? What have we done?!

It ended up great, in the end. James went door to door, meeting some new neighbors and calling on ones we've already met, offering them all the woodchips their little hearts desired. Three of our neighbors ended up taking us up on the offer! It was a great bonding moment, actually.

I'm estimating that all in all, it was at least 200 wheelbarrows-full. At one point we actually had to knock it down and spread it out, because it was so hot it was smoking. The grass is still burnt and ugly where the pile sat. We ended up using maybe 1/5 of the pile for ourselves (in the side yard and along the deck/jungle border).

The side yard isn't done yet, but you get the idea.

ALSO: We have a piano and treadmill now! Now that the rains have arrived, it's great having a fully-functional gym. The piano is from my mom. It is our family piano, and I haven't lived with it for over a decade. Seeing it in my new house really, really makes it feel like home.

Catching Up

It's been a while! I've been out of town, and honestly it's been relatively slow-going around here. That's not to say that no progress has been made. Here's what we've been doing:

1. My garden is growing like a weed! And with weeds. The first lettuces are ready for eatin'.



















2. Spray painted our white metal mailbox black, to match the painted light fixtures and soon-to-be-installed shutters.


3. Spray painted the cruddy plastic patio furniture we unwittingly inherited a fun teal color.


4. FINALLY finished digging up that stubborn flower bed. It's ready for landscape fabric, mulch, and flowers!


5. Dug up the pavers that sat between the garage/path and planted some fun fountain grasses. Needs landscape fabric and mulch next, but you get the drift.

6. Laid out and started digging up the ground for pavers. These are the pavers that came from the above pic. This will help us cut across our lawn more easily, as well as add some geometrical interest. I like it.

7. Spray painted the last of the brass light fixtures. This fun lil fella was filled with the crunchy, rotted corpses of the previous 5,000 bug inhabitants. DEAR GOD.

8. Decorated for Fall/Halloween! That's right, people!!

Happy Fall, everyone!

Working with what we have

I realized today that most of our projects of late have involved taking crappy remnants from the previous owner that have fallen into disrepair, and fixin' 'em up. Which is great, because we're recycling and reusing, but more importantly we are totally broke. Really, other than the masterfully constructed squirrel cage (I'll get to that in a moment), all of our projects this weekend have been sprucing up old stuff, and it's worked out great so far!

First up, a few days after moving in we discovered the original 1960's brass house numbers in a spider pile on the side of the garage. Some black spray paint and voila! Elegant new numbers. We took down the hideous tile numbers (I can't even tell you what kind of horrors we discovered living behind it... sweet Jesus almighty) and installed the old-new ones. Then, we took off the cream(ish) colored doorbell and spray painted it black. We're working on doing the same with the old brass light fixtures, but they're not done yet.

I'm sure some people might enjoy this aesthetic, but I am certainly not one of them.

Delightfully dirty plastic grossness

After! Just imagine it with grey paint.... Soon, house. Soon....

Better!

 

I feel like the black fixtures will look especially great once we paint the house. The crappy tan color doesn't do much for them. It doesn't do much for anything.... Moving on!

Hidden in that jungle we chopped back a couple of weeks ago was a cool old metal and wood bench. The metal was dirty and stained, and the wood slats were completely rotten. We disassembled the whole thing and are going to (you guessed it!) spray paint the metal parts to look all shiny and new, and install new wood slats. I can't wait to finish this one!

The before pic. Really doesn't do the rotten wood justice, just trust me on this!

Pile o' metal.

So that veggie patch I built last weekend? It was crawling with squirrels and blue jays within 24 hours. Those jerks were digging up my seeds and burying shit in there! So, I spent an hour and a half this morning constructing a movable "squirrel cage". It is made of thick wire fencing around the sides, and lightweight plastic netting on top. Pretty darn proud of it, myself!

Let's see you get in there now, assholes!

And, since a great deal of my time is spent on gardening, here are some gratuitous flower pics.

Yellow canna

Hot pink dahlias. These are probably my favorite, and are really blooming well.

Herb garden on the left, lavender on the right. Between the two, the back deck smells amazing now!

Pink hibiscus

Settling in (Or: There goes all of my extra time)

Obviously, we moved into the house and are now pleasantly knee-deep in projects. Until this past Thursday we were without internet, so I haven't been able to post updates on the 8,000 things we've done to this house.

There are too many updates to list, but here's a highlights reel:

1. We removed the god-awful white railings that were on the front porch (they were INTERIOR railings, by the way...), power washed the porch, and added flowers. Before the rains start, we will paint the house a medium grey, with white trim, black shutters, and a black door. The front flower beds also need some serious work.

2. We power washed the back deck, added flowers and seating. Then, we cut back Mother Nature, who was attempting to swallow our deck whole.

3. We painted everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean every single inch of the interior of this house. You'll all be happy to hear that after 3 weeks, my hair is finally paint-free! I still need to do quite a bit of touch-up, though, so don't be sad.... it will be back. I also spent quite a bit of time decorating the built-ins, so everyone BEHOLD.

4. We ripped out the icky brown carpet from the 3 bedrooms and installed clean, pretty laminate. Also, my Dad installed a cool grey vinyl tile over the hideous linoleum that was in the bathroom. It is 800% better.

5. We set up the garage. It now has outlets, light switches, lights and tools a-plenty. This is an old shot, it's a bit tidier than this, but you get the idea.
















6. Today we are finishing up the Fall veggie patch. Here's a progress pic from last night.















Stay tuned!