Before and After
My goodness, I can hardly believe it has been two months since I last updated. We’ve done quite a bit around the yard, but it has definitely been winding down. Lots of smaller jobs here and there. We finished painting the front stairs, and it’s amazing at how much it tied the whole house together. It really made a big impact. As well, our tenant Rick built and painted a pergola outside the suite entrance. I knew it would be awesome, but I had no idea how much it would help straighten out the house. As you’ll see in the following photos, before the house looked crooked (it’s not just the wide angle). Something was just a little bit off. The pergola grounded and balanced the house.
I keep looking at the first set of before and after photos and I smile every time. The house looks amazing now! I know the difference between winter and summer makes everything look better, but still there is a lot of change to the house and the yard. We’re quite pleased, to say the least.
Below you’ll find a series of “before and after” photos. Enjoy!
Filed under gardening, landscaping, yard | Comments (3)Update on the Landscaping
I’ve been so busy I hardly have time to update this website! We’ve been very yard-focussed this past month. So much has been done since the last update. Our yard looks awesome now. I can hardly believe how hard we’ve worked.
There are lots of nice detail and flower photos on my flicker stream.
- Our grass is lush and healthy, and it needs a mow, but we don’t have a lawnmower.
- I haven’t finished planting everything yet, but will hopefully in the next week or two. I needed more topsoil and had some delivered last Friday. Seven yards! We need a better wheelbarrow too.
- We had Rick, our tenant downstairs, build a set of stairs from the driveway up to the backyard. They look great and I’m so pleased. (We’re going to have him build a pergola outside the suite too.) I have to finish leveling out the topsoil from the stairs out to each side, and then I’ll be planting some shrubs and ground cover. There is some grass and weeds on the right side that I need to deal with as well.
- I put up a short stone wall on one the side of the driveway up to the front stairs. I was going to just plant a few flowers at the front of the yard and put in some rocks, and we had intended on putting up a picket fence too. So from the road, you would see the plants and then the fence behind it. Once I began planting, I decided to put in a path of round pavers in order to get in there to garden without sinking in the mud. The rock garden ended up being a lot more work than I had planned. Two weekends ago, we also decided against the fence. There are a lot of lines on the house and the stairs, and we thought it might look too chaotic. (We had already bought the pickets too, so we returned them.)
- A month ago Tyler used all the limestone (which we scored for a super good deal from a local landscaper) to make a rock wall around a part of the driveway. Last week, I “finessed” it, backfilling the wall and adding smaller rocks in the nooks to make it a bit more substantial. I think it looks awesome. I also planted some ground cover above it, and behind that will be a row of low, bushy junipers.
- A few weeks ago it was our last burn weekend in Sooke, and we spent a whole day cleaning up the east side of the yard and throwing it on the fire. Ty also cleaned up under the front stairs and spread gravel there. What a difference that made. He made a little path behind it too, and a place to put our garbage bins, out of sight.
- This last weekend I spent half the day on Saturday at a workshop on ethnobotany. We walked through the forest at the Beecher Bay reserve, learning about native plants. Very interesting! On Sunday, we started priming the front stairs and railing. Ty also finished installing the cedar decking on the floor of the front patio. The deck looks great, and just needs a clear coat. The weather is fussy, very spring in Victoria, but I did manage to paint some more of the railing today. It’s just primer, and the stairs look better already!
- We had four or five roofers come by too, to look at our roof and give us an estimate. We had quotes from $8,500 to $16,000! One roofer found FOUR layers of shingles on the house. The roof looks horrible and really needs to be replaced, but the $ is a big ouch, especially since I’m not working. Our gutters need to be fixed or replaced too. One is falling off the side of the house. We’re thinking we’ll bite the bullet and just get it done.
- Still to come: a stone wall for the OTHER side of the driveway, perhaps a stone wall for where the picket fence would have been, clearing out the ditch and encouraging just grass to grow, maybe a gardening shed at the front west side of the property, fill in and spread wild flower seeds on the west side too. Inside: paint the walls, paint our funky old wooden ladder, paint the hardwood floors upstairs a high-gloss black, 1/4 round edging, install new baseboard heaters, rearrange the living room. And so much more…
Exhausted
I was sick for two days, Monday and Tuesday, after three days of pushing my body further than it was prepared for. I think it was likely a combination of all the hard work (shoveling and raking and lifting rocks) and a meal or two that didn’t sit well. I awoke early on Monday morning with nausea and aches, and while I luckily didn’t have to “throw up” at all, I did need to make numerous trips to the bathroom all day. I slept most of the day, missing Sophie’s birthday party and a sewing session with Kari, but my body was definitely telling me it needed rest. Tuesday I spent in recovery, as I was feeling very weak. Today my body feels almost normal, except for a few sore muscles, so as long as it doesn’t rain (too hard), I plan to be outside and get all those plants and trees in the ground.
I’m almost a tad hesitant, however, because there’s a neighbour who comes ’round and critiques my plant and tree choices, and even our landscaping choices! I’m choosing to just be nice about it all, because she doesn’t really listen to me when I talk anyways. So it feels futile to explain that each thing we do is for a good reason (like putting a three-foot-high picket fence in the front will block OUR view of the ditch and the road). She also insisted that north was south, and south was north…and laughed at me when I tried to suggest otherwise. It was bothering me a little, but now I realize she’s quite confused and maybe there’s a serious reason for it. She really is a nice lady, despite her near-constant Bible quotes and referrals to “living with the Spirit.”
Filed under gardening, yard | Comments OffSpring Gardening
It’s spring and I AM SO HAPPY! Spring and summer are by far my most favourite seasons. The past winter was really tough for me. The craziness began last July-August when we bought the house, and it hasn’t much subsided since. Buying, packing, moving, getting settled, fostering Leeloo, adopting Piper, having the hardwood floors installed, Christmas, building the shed, losing my job, fixing up the suite, and now the landscaping, front deck and suite patio; these eight months have been extremely stressful, and I’m ready for a little break. Once the yard is fixed up, there aren’t any huge projects left for me to work on, except painting some of our rooms, which isn’t really a pressing item.
A week and a half ago we had our severely compacted “soil” (well, clay really) tilled. Then we had 10 yards of garden top soil delivered, which last weekend we raked out and graded. It was rough work. My back and right arm suffered. (Side note: Ever since I sanded the suite, my right arm has been sore, and at night when I sleep it goes numb. Sometimes my left arm numbs too, and I can’t sleep on my tummy or back very well, so…yeah, I haven’t been sleeping very well for the past three weeks.) Last week I studied gardening magazines and the Internet for information on what types of plants would flourish in our yard. I spent a small fortune on shrubs, trees, seeds, ground cover, grasses and other plants, as well as tools, Sea Soil, and such. I’ve even made friends with the lady who owns a small nursery near our house! I keep running into her in town and we stop to chitchat — she’s so sunny, I just love to see her.
Ty took Thursday off, and we rented a truck to get the rest of the supplies we needed. On Thursday we picked up our new lawn, two yards of bark mulch and a truckload of limestone rock. On Friday, in three loads, we got another two yards of bark mulch, two yards of top soil, a yard of flatstone gravel, four barrels of sand, another truckload of limestone and blue rock, 16 18-inch round pavers, and nine concrete caps. We did that all in four hours. All those rocks? We had to pick through a huge pile of them and carry them to the truck. After we finished unloading, we each had a beer, went to Mom’s for lunch, and when I got home I slept in the sun on the chaise for about two hours. Holy crap I was exhausted.
On Saturday, we picked up another load of natural rock (looks like slate), three garbage cans full of sand, and 60 feet of concrete stacking stones for a wall around the driveway. Then we were able to finally start working on the yard, with all our supplies picked up, and so Ty took the clippers to the brush and old, fallen-down fence on the side of the house. I put in some landscaping edging and flatstone rock. It’s starting to look good! (See more photos of the progress at my flickr account.)
More projects planned for today, and tomorrow is our day off. Phew. I’m pooped.
Filed under gardening, landscaping, spring, yard | Comments Off