Procrastination—AKA: A Typical Saturday

The fence repair did get done—eventually. Here you can see how good the soil looks in the new flower bed. All those leaves composting in the woodpile helped a lot.

This is where I will build the firewood holder—between the fireplace and the gate. It seems like a logical place to me. I should probably get another drain extension, although I had to at almost $10 per length. Someone is making money on these things.

The chipper turned a brush pile into nice mulch. This is where the dead fence boards and most of my scrap lumber from other projects will eventually wind up.

Today was the perfect day for working in the yard. The highs climbed up to the mid-fifties, and even though the wind was brisk, it was not too chilly to enjoy the sunshine.

Well, it was a little brisk, and I realized that I didn’t have a work coat that would stand up to the combination of temperature and wind. So my first task was a trip to Goodwill, where I got a nice oversized flannel jacket and a couple of sweaters.

Then I was off—to the knitting store! I stopped in to see Suna, and we went to Starbucks for a cup. Or we would have, but they were out of coffee. They emptied two different pots to give Suna hers and told me I was welcome to wait. I chose not to.

I dropped Suna back at the knitting store and went to the home center for some stuff. I got some fence boards for the repair, a night light for the hall, some cup hooks for the master bath, and some pier blocks to build a firewood holder. Then I headed back to the house.

Inside the fence and behind the repair was a pile of boards left over from when the evil neighborhood association made us tear down Beccano’s tree house. So the first step was to sort those out and remove the remaining nails. I know I should have done that a long time ago, but…

Next, I strung out an extension to the downspout that will run underneath the firewood holder I plan to build behind the part of the fence I hadn’t yet repaired. I noticed that these was a high point in the middle of the run. Since water doesn’t usually flow uphill, I got out the trusty action hoe and a rake to change the grade a bit. That left a pile of well composted dirt.

A shovel solved that problem. I moved the dirt to the new flower bed extension, but it still wasn’t quite right. Luckily, I still had the garden rake at hand to level the bed until it was just right.

By this time it was starting to get colder…and darker. I went back to the garage to find my hammer. It was finally time to take down those pesky rotted fence boards. I knocked down the bad one and damaged the one next to it enough that it had to come down, too. Then I aligned two of the replacement boards. That’s when I noticed that sometime between when this house was built and now, the standard size for narrow fence boards shrank from just under four inches to just under 3½ inches. That means any fence repair now requires removing at least three boards, replacing them with two different sizes, and using a table saw. Sigh.

I have a few of the wider boards left over from a failed attempt at rebuilding the gate (I put it together backwards). So I was set. All I had to do was knock down three times the number of boards I had intended to replace at that spot, meaning I don’t have enough to do the other repairs I planned. No problem there as it was now too dark to continue by the time I finished ripping the wide board to size and the old boards to fit through the chipper.

I did get one thing accomplished today, so I can say that this does not qualify for what one of my friends calls adult-onset ADD.

The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

New raised bed with retaining wall

We are all just flowers in God’s garden

That is why He spreads the shit around

—David Byrne

This weekend was spent doing what Robert Heinlein called “pick and shovel work to prolong life.” OK. It wasn’t so much to prolong life as to make the yard look better.

Yesterday I built a nice retaining wall and flower bed. It was the first time I had ever built this kind of wall. The hard part is getting the first row of stones level. After that it takes care of itself. It will be nice. We can sit on the wall to weed the bed, and I can reach the center of the bed from all of the edges.

The picture is the finished product, but Suna posted a couple of pictures of the work in progress, if you’re interested. Beccano even helped turn the dirt and mix in the garden soil.

Today, we bought a little more soil and the plants for the bed. I turned in the additional soil. The local soil has very little organic material—something I hope to rectify over the next few years. Then the plants went in.

Catelina Midnight Blue

Beccano’s choice

Suna wanted red petunias to carry forward the red theme. I bought a tomato (Mr. Stripey) and some sweet basil). I planted the petunias a couple of inches in from the center of each top stone. Then I made another row a few inches in from that. I planted 10-15-Y onions in between each onion. (Can you guess which song I couldn’t get out of my head? Right—except these were onions in a petunia patch.) The tomato and the basil (turns out there were two in the same pot) are in the center.

Then I went to work finishing the new gate I started yesterday when Suna and Beccano went to the home store to buy the rest of the rocks I needed to build the retaining wall. It turned out beautifully…except that I laid the skeleton down the wrong direction. So I built the prettiest gate I have ever made up-side-down and backwards. So since I was running out of daylight, I repaired the old dog-chewed gate enough to last the season.

The good news is that I used 5/8” staples. When I picked up the new gate, one of the boards popped off. So I shouldn’t have too much trouble taking it apart and rebuilding it. Sigh. It’s like erasing a whole sock of knitting, but with a lot more physical labor.