Category Archives: house

gardening 4 Comments

Getting Back In Touch With My Garden

While I was home today, nursing my lower back, Aaron suggested that I go into the back yard and check out the plants that are actually thriving on my benign neglect.

Turns out that the tiger lilies daylilies that I planted back in the fall are not only big and bushy, but are about to bloom! They’re currently sporting tall stalks topped with large orange buds. A photo op will soon be had.

The roses of sharon that I kept in my watering can are still green, while the one I planted in the ground is officially a dead stick. I can deal with hydroponic altheas, I suppose. Maybe someday I’ll manage to plant them somewhere appropriate.

My herb garden was the big shocker for me. I’d just about given up on it after the fuzzy aminals ate all my parsley and sweet basil. All that was left was catnip and two lemon basil plants.

The catnip are a freakin’ foot tall now. And the lemon basil plants are healthy and bushy. Who knew?

I harvested several stalks of catnip, and have some catnip tea chilling in the fridge right now. (I think I put too much honey in it, though. Oops.) I currently have about five stalks of catnip hanging in my dining room, and I have every intention of making Mei a cute catnip toy with The Good Stuff™, as soon as it dries.

Moral of the story? Bulbs good. Invasive herbs good (for my gardening style, anyway). High-maintenance plants not so good.

house 1 Comment

Painting Complete

I mentioned before that taping the trim and ceiling took two hours on Saturday night. What I didn’t mention was that I woke up on Sunday with a twinge in my lower back, presumably from bending over and applying painter’s tape to over 60 linear feet of trim and window and such.

No matter. After lunch on Sunday, we laid down the plastic dropcloth and began priming the room. That took an hour and a half, then we waited another hour for the primer to dry, during which time I became better acquainted with the pain in my back. Laid on the floor, did some stretching, and was ready to go for the actual painting process.

After we thought we were done for the day, and after Aaron had already showered, I read on the internets that it would probably be a good idea to remove the tape before the paint dried. So we did that. (The above photo was taken while Aaron was getting his shower on, and before we removed the painter’s tape.) We had a few oopsies, including blooping paint down through the tape in one place and accidentally peeling the old ceiling paint off in others, but I’m not really upset about that.

I think we were a little concerned that one gallon of paint wouldn’t be enough to cover the entire room, so we probably spread the paint a little too thin. At any rate, we have a few touch-ups to do tomorrow. Overall, I’m still pleased with the result.

Check out more photos of the painting aftermath on Flickr!

PS – My back is still sore, but it’s getting better. Taking a walk today really helped to loosen it up. I’m going to try to lower myself into a nice hot bath shortly.

house 3 Comments

Painting

Well, last weekend was Mom’s visit, and the weekend before was the Waterville Community Garage Sale, so this weekend has been the first where we’ve been able to think about painting the small bedroom.

Yesterday, we hit Home Depot and bought all our supplies: painting implements, dropcloths, painter’s tape, spackle, putty knives, and other miscellany. Including primer and paint, of course. We’re painting the room in April Mist, which is kind of a light green with a tinge of blue to it.

We didn’t actually start on anything until well after dinner yesterday. Around 9pm or so, we moved all the furniture and boxes out of the room and vacuumed the carpet. Then we spent two hours taping the edges: baseboard trim, ceiling, window, all that. We finally got done around midnight.

Today, once Aaron wakes up and we have lunch, we’ll start on applying our one coat of primer (Kilz, of course), let it dry, then one coat of paint. We’ll see if that’s sufficient, or if we’ll need to go get another gallon of paint for a second coat. The room is small — 9′ x 9′ — so one gallon of paint should suffice, assuming we only need one coat. We’ll see.

Taping went relatively well, if slowly, so hopefully that was the most tedious part of the process. I hope we don’t screw anything up too bad today. 🙂

house, parenthood, ruminations 9 Comments

Thinking Ahead

Aaron and I are planning to paint several rooms in our house during our vacation in August. The living room will say goodbye to its pastel ragroll of the 1990’s, the dining room will shed its southwestern feel, and the smallest bedroom will start its journey from cat/sewing/storage room to small person’s living space. (Don’t want to call it a “nursery” yet, being that we’re not even trying for kids yet, you know. Don’t want to get Mom all riled up.) 😉

See, I figure that it would be unfair to say that I wanted the bedroom painted before someone — no matter how small — moves in, then to shirk the actual responsibility of painting it because pregnant women shouldn’t be exposed to strong chemical fumes. So, we’re doing the painting together, before we get our bareback going on.

I already have a very wide theme planned: anime. (Of course.) Totoro would be a good theme for babies of either gender, really, and easily supplemented by either Hello Kitty and general cuteness or mecha and other boyishness. Plus, I think it would be fun to custom-paint some pillowcases and light-switches.

Thinking about furnishing and decorating our future child’s room made me think about this future child, and how we’ll deal with parenthood. It’s finally becoming something that’s planned, that’s going to happen, instead of speaking hypothetically. It’ll be interesting, sure, and exhausting, and everything I’ve heard it is. But I think that, between Aaron and me, we’ll do OK. We were raised differently enough, but turned out similar enough, that I don’t think we’ll screw our firstborn up too much. No more so than most, anyway.

For now, though, I think I’ll stick to thinking about things like what color to paint the bedroom.

gardening

Seedlings = Planted

Yesterday, Scott gave me about a dozen Rose of Sharon shrublings (twigs with leaves and roots) that he removed from a friend’s yard. However, it rained like a mofo yesterday, so all I could do was stick them in a watering can full of water and hope for the best. This morning, before work, they actually looked pretty good. Perky, not wilty. Good sign.

When I got home from work today, I made myself some dinner and then prepared myself for some digging in the dirt. When all was said and done, I spent about an hour and a half gardening in the mud.

I ended up removing a patch of grass along the west fence that was maybe a little bigger than four feet square. I attempted to transplant the grass/sod/whatever to a bare patch in our lawn, handfuls at a time. We’ll see if that takes, or if Aaron berates me for attempting it. Anyway, I planted one Rose of Sharon in the middle of that newly-created dirt patch, and left the others in the watering can.

All the while, the wind was kicking up and it was threatening to rain, so I re-evaluated my evening of gardening fun once I was done getting the Rose of Sharon securely in the ground. (I hope.) I ended up leaving the remaining Roses of Sharon in favor of creating my little herb garden plot, as my seedlings were starting to look kind of peaked.

I ended up digging up a patch about three feet by five feet, right by the house, underneath the air conditioner. Believe it or not, it seems that this area gets the most sunshine during the most hours of the day. I hope I’m right about that. Anyway, I ended up with six catnip plants in the back row, six sweet basil in the middle row, and two lemon basil in the front row with six closely-spaced parsley plants. I really hope they take.

My two remaining hollyhocks ain’t doing too good. I put them in the front, with the other sun-loving plants that need planted soon. I think they’ll live, although I’m not sure if they’ll bloom (which will make it a challenge for them to reseed themselves for next year).

Aaron has gone on the record as being unenthused about me digging up so much grass, being that we already have giant grassless patches in the back yard. I’m going to make a concerted effort to make all this shit live this year, though. I want to make our shit pretty, dammit. I will make this work.