Better luck next time

I had to go out to the farm and check on the bees - good thing I did, one hive was getting cramped and thinking about planning a swarm. They have enough room now, they should be happy for a few weeks.
It meant that I only had one day to get things done, and it got hot fast. I got a trash bag worth of poison ivy pulled, the lawn mowed, the driveway swept and the cracks treated with vinegar, and the overgrown white lilac taken down by the back door. (Thus making the brush pile big again. sigh.)
That garden currently looks like crap - like an over gown toddler got loose with scissors and mauled the bushes. There's a honey suckle in there that caught part of the pruning, but still needs more. A few thing happened about the same time - I noticed some very healthy poison ivy growing in there, and I wasn't properly gloved for dealing with it; it reached peak hot for the day; and I ran out of giddyup. This last part was probably because I wasn't drinking or eating enough. I called it quits, dragged myself to the shower and then to bed for a nap. (I don't nap.)
I had wanted to get the last of the basement clean out and the cellar stairs painted, but that wasn't going to happen. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck, so I made dinner and binge watched some Tv.

But here's some pretty pictures of what's flowering!

Single peonies and Siberian irises

I have found one hill of white/yellow irises out back.
I'd like to divide and sprinkle this around to breakup all the purple, but there's not much of it.

I do have one double peony plant!
Big floppy happy plants.

There's a mock orange out by the shed.
It needs a hard haircut, and the branches above it need a hard trim.

Single peonies

Iris and False Solomon's Seal.

The rhubarb is going to flower.

Front of the house. That whole bed is purple iris, purple spiderwort, and poison ivy.
This whole area needs to be reworked, but I'm afraid the only solutions are going to be well beyond my budget.

Let there be light?

When last we left our excitable homeowner, she'd finished making the front foundation pretty.

Prettier.

Earlier in the day, I'd gotten it into my head that I wanted the concrete planter stand gone from the front of the house. There was only one, to the right of the door, it was kind of ugly, and if I was going to do something, I was was going to do it once and right.
At about 9:30 am, I got out my gloves and sledge hammer and started whaling away on the cube. It reminded me of the pads in the cemeteries where you'd put a cement urn for flowers. Considering I'd just helped my mom put flowers in just such urns, I had them on my mind. The center square was different than the rest, but I chalked it up to weathering with a long gone urn on top.

It didn't want to budge. At all.
I started putting some heft into it - my very best "I'm going to win that danged stuffed critter at the fair game" hammer blows. The center started to break up!

Progress!

I started to pull out the center pieces. It was coming out very... uniform.
Specifically square.
Almost as if the center had been poured after... the edges...
After pulling out about 4-6" of cement, I encountered sand. Lot of it. The sort of sand that felt sharp and masonry-like.
And in the sand was buried bricks.
I was hoping for treasure. (This house is wanting for treasure.)

It was at this point that something clicked in my brain. There's a funny window thing in the basement, small and square-ish and boarded over from the back.
Could it... was it... no...

Oh But Yes It Was.

At some point, after the granite step was put in, someone took the time to pour a window well for this one tiny window.
They didn't bother to pour the rest of the apron the seven or so feet to the corner of the house.
(Just a blob of a window well.)
Which then later someone else decided they didn't want any more, so they slapped a piece of 1/4" plywood behind the window, filled the void with grey cement bricks, poured a ton of sand over the bricks, and then iced this halfassed cake with cement.

Excavating the window well from the outside.
This is where I got half of the grey bricks I used for edging this side of the house, and the sand to sort of bed them.

Excavating the window well from the inside.
Shop vac to the rescue.

The frame for the window is shot. As you can see, it's gone on the bottom, and the sides are eaten/rotted almost all the way up.

This leaves me with a conundrum.
On one hand, it's nice to have natural light into that part of the basement. I'm sure that's what they were thinking at the time when they put it in. It can't be made bigger - on one side is the massive piece of front step granite, and on the other side is a massive piece of foundation granite that holds up the house.

On the other hand, while functional, the window well is ugly, and it's Right There. If it was more neatly poured, or not stuck to the front of the house like a concrete pimple, I'd probably just rebuild a window for the space and call it good.
But it's not somewhere else.

Eventually, I think I'm going to remove the window well, (or at least the top bit) find some stone, and close it up right, probably when I'm re-pointing the basement.
For now, I've got some of my super-handy roofing slates covering up the hole so that small mammals don't decide my home is their home.

I'll have to deal with it at some point before the winter.

The slate is almost exactly the right size to cover the hole.
Rodent, but not insect proof.

It started with the goldenrod

On Saturday, I noticed that the very large beds in the side yard were overrun with blackberry and goldenrod. I hadn't noticed because the goldenrod kind of looks like the tall phlox. The bed is shared with Siberian Irises and Peonies that were starting to look very shaded out.
I started pulling. And pulling.
Made my way through those to beds and around to the front bed where I decided to spend a little time pulling poison ivy. After doing that for long enough to know I'd probably gotten at least a little on my arms, I turned my attention to the front foundation of the house.

At some point in the distant past, a concrete apron was poured around the edge of the house. On the north and south side, it's a good foot+ out from the house. On the west side, it's only maybe 6". On the east side, (the front), it didn't appear to have any apron at all.
Well, that's not entirely true.
Upon further examination, to the left of the front door, there appeared to be a foot wide apron extending up to a poured concrete window well. I thought that perhaps, over time, the soil level and vegetation had just come up over the apron along the rest of the front, and that it needed to be exposed.

A little back story about why I was compelled to expose the apron and/or foundation -
The other night, I came home to find a big fat black ant sitting squarely in the middle of my bed.
The carpenter variety.
Big enough where even the cat just looked at me blankly, as if to say, "awe heck no. That's your problem."
I'd treated the foundation with Ortho Home Defense granules, but this bugger got through.
Carpenter ants will send out foragers in the spring to locate food and new digs. I'm betting that's what this one was, but I can't have anything insect related thinking this was a good idea.
The ant got squashed, and I got to have dreams about giant monster ants eating my house that night.
My foundation and thus my wooden sill are perilously close to surface ground level. This is likely because the house was built into the side of a slope 150 years ago, and soil has been washing down and building up ever since. Short of something ridiculously drastic like major heavy-equipment landscaping or jacking the house up and extending the foundation by a foot, that is not going to change. But I can make sure that I'm not providing insects any easy access to my abode.
Friends, please understand - No matter what Home Depot or Lowes or HGTV try to sell you, foundation plantings are just not a good idea, particularly when your house is made out of a delicious insect buffet. Mulch and vegetation provide a highway right into your home. It also holds moisture against your home, which for anything wood is not a stellar idea.

This is the window well that must have used up the last of the cement.

I started digging. The apron only went to the window well and stopped. I don't know why, it sort of felt like they ran out of cement and called it quits. But someone had taken the time to run a line of bricks under the drip edge of the roof over to the front step. Only to the left of the front door, there was nothing to the right. The soil was an average about 3" from the siding, and grass was actively growing up under it.
Saturday, I took the grass and dirt down about 4-6 inches. That brought us to here:

There's the bricks that were hiding under the grass.

And dug out.

Sunday I got up, determined to finish the front. If you go back and look at that last photo, you'll see a funny concrete platform next to the granite step. (The step is also level with the ground and will need to be addressed, as currently my front door doesn't meet code.)
If I was going to spend my time and money making the front of the house pretty, I wanted that cement slab gone.
I got out my sledge hammer and mason's hammer and... that's a story for a different post.
The short of it is I have a new/old window in my basement, about 12 free grey cement bricks and about 50 lbs of sharp sand.

I re-edged the grass, and took the bricks I'd excavated out from the left side of the door and inserted them behind the granite step to replace the crumbling ones there, filling the gaps with the sand. The bricks are really neat - there's different names stamped into them, so I made sure they were name side up.

I need to wash the lichens off the house.

 Then I went to Home Depot, where I got weed block cloth, 14 more grey cement bricks, and 7 sacks of crushed bluestone. I know I probably could have gotten the stone cheaper in bulk, but I don't need a whole yard of stone, and I don't have a truck.
When you have all the stuff you need, things go surprisingly quickly.
I cut the fabric and put down a double layer, laid some roofing slate flat and sprinkled it with ant and grub killer. I figure the slates  will help keep the weeds down.

Nice and flat.

Ta Da!

So much cleaner!

So much easier to keep the bugs away!

I hear you now - "Why?! Why is there a brick missing in the middle?"
Well, because there's a rock that's tied into the cement of the window well that sits right below the surface.
So, a gap.
Not ideal, but I don't need to be pouring new window wells.

Which brings me back to that funny cement platform I was beating up with a sledge hammer...

More surprises from the yard

I went home over the holiday weekend to visit my parents, check the bees and help my Mom get some seasonal chores tidied up. When I got back, I found that more new things are blooming around the yard.

Blackberries are getting ready to bloom.
I've left a few of the second year canes to see what kind of fruit they bear -
if it's worth taming them into cultivation or not.

This sleepy Poppy was not quite open.
It's in the weird cement planter on the side of the house - I have to find a new home for it.

Iris on Hosta

Iris under Fern

There's grapes in the mix.

A very pretty, very out-of-control Wisteria is currently crushing the life out of some of the lilacs in front of the house.

Asters among the Spiderwort

A a pretty little clump of Buttercups.

The conclusion to the flowerbed.

I took yesterday off from work. Primarily, because it was my birthday and I didn't want to be at work. Happy bonus is that the weather was beautiful, and I was able to get the flowerbed I started over the weekend done.

This is where I left off on Sunday, and started Wednsday.

I decided to edge the bed with old roofing slates, the reasons being -
1) They can be shaped, sort of.
2) Environmentally friendly.
3) The price was right.

Roofing slates are pretty big, and I didn't need to hammer 14" of slate into the ground, even in an attempt to keep things out of the bed. This was really just so that the dirt didn't run away. Or ran away slower, at least.
Slate is a really under-utilized building material. Fire proof, rot proof, rodent proof, it's only enemies are acid rain, time and an errant tree falling on it. We still have a bunch of 100 year old roofing slates because of it's vertical durability.
Horizontally, it's durability is another matter. Remember that tree I mentioned? Well, a hammer works similarly.

My proof of concept.
(And my mason hammer.)

When struck on the face with a solid sharp blow, you can leave a very nice punched hole in slate. It's how they put holes in the slates to hang them on roofs.

A hole that matches the profile of my hammer end.

The reverse side blows out though, leaving a dished surface.

Cool.

Because of this nature, you can kind of predict how slate is going to work with you. What I would do is pick up a slate, and drop it on the lawn flat to see if there were any hairline cracks where it wanted to break. Barring that, I'd give them a good pop in the middle and see if that would inspire any cracking. From there I'd perforate a line when I'd prefer it to crack. 90% it would work, sometimes it would crack in weird ways.

split into 3.

I hammered them into the edge, I like to think decoratively. I needed to use a wood block because hitting hammer on stone would cause the stone to flake and splinter. Even using the wood block caused some cracking.

Edged!

Plant placement!

Right about this step it started to look a whole lot like the Crazy Old Cat Lady Backyard Cemetery Starter Kit. I had put slates in below each plant to further slow erosion, and to make little shelves to hold the plants where they belonged.
I started to second guess my decisions...

Tada! With plants planted and mulch!

Luckily, with the addition of mulch, it looks a whole less Crazy Old Cat Lady. I've put in 3 white, 2 dark pink, 1 light blue and one purple creeping phlox, 2 Sliver Mounds and 2 Lemon variegated Thyme.

What a weekend

Wherein I tried to do all the things, by myself, while under a deadline.
Saturday morning I woke up bright and early and drove out to Uhaul to pick up the truck. I had a deadline to hit - the brush dump closes at 1 on Saturdays, and I wanted to make the most of my quality time with the truck. I was able to average 1 load an hour, so 4 loads of debris gone. The debris included:
• All of the trimmings from the back yard, which included a lot of blackberry canes, and black raspberry vines (1 load),

After the pickup - Trust me, the edge of the woods was encroaching a lot more before my Thursday night brush cutting fiesta.

• All of the pile from the front yard that was here when I bought the place, which included lots of old lilac trunks, wet leaves, 1 broken leaf rake, 1 Nikon lens cover, and 2 green and blue Nerf darts (1 load),

Now you see it.

Now you don't.
That was one full 8' pickup bed of sodden leaves.
(And some sort of rodent nests.)

• 2/3 of the giant pile from in front of the shed (2 loads. A third would have finished it.)

Before. I forgot to grab an "after" - I'll update it later.

 I did my best to avoid the Dreaded Poison Ivy. I intended to go out fully suited, but it was already so warm, my choices were to potentially itch, or drop from heat. I put on the long rubber gloves and long sleeved shirt and just hoped a lot. I also washed my hands and face between dump runs.
So far *knock wood* it seems to have worked.
Also, literally pouring your own sweat out of the rubber gloves was... gross.
The witching hour came all too soon, and I had to bring the truck back. I made so much progress in such a short period of time, I was really bummed it couldn't have gone on longer. But the Town of Grafton forced me to pace myself. Maybe it's for the best.
Then I mowed my lawn.

Next up was to fix the holes in the floor of my basement. I have a radon system that relies on positive pressure to suck the radon out from under the floor before it filters up through the concrete and into the house. When they installed the system, the back of the basement was still covered in about 2-6" of sand and dirt. When I cleaned it out, I discovered that there were a number of rectangular holes down into the ground, likely left over from a long-forgotten coal room that was present when the floor was poured. I can't have holes in the positive pressure system, so I got to play with cement patch.

I tried to put my initials in it, but the fast patch stuff didn't like to hold details.

It seems to have set up nicely.

Sunday dawned rainy, so I did a bunch of chores and errands - laundry, grocery, cleaning and tidying the house. I have to say, I never thought (back in college) when I hoarded quarters in order to make clean socks that I would still be hoarding quarters 20 years later.
It cleared up that afternoon, and I decided (on a whim) that after having only mowed the lawn twice, that mowing the hill behind the house was for the birds. It needed to be not-mowable. I stopped at High Hill Farm in Westborough and picked up a bunch of creeping phlox, some lemon thyme, and some odd fluffy thing. I got home, put all the groceries away, and started turning the hill into a flower bed.
Turning hills into flower beds is harder than flat ground. There's more odd bending and stretching. But by 6:30 on Sunday evening, I had a good half of the bed turned.

Before.

After. About 2/3 there.

I need to figure out how I'm going to edge/hold the dirt back. I put some old bricks Alicia and I found around the bottom for now, but I'm not 100% sold on it. I have to stop by Home Depot for some mulch so I'll think about it. I've seen some neat ideas using planks and/or pipes hammered into the ground. I have some planks from the basement clean out that I could cut up and repurpose...

That was that.
This week, I'll try to finish the flower bed, and then get to work on the upstairs bedrooms. The Ben Moore sale is on!

Light

My intention is to eventually strip, sand and repaint this door, but this morning I enjoyed watching the shadows of it's long life play out in the light.

Morning light, reflected off the floor down the hallway.

It's been a little while

Hi there.
I didn't forget you.
I got busy with a work trip to Vegas, and a trip out to the Hudson Valley to help with volunteer day at Eastfield Village and a visit to Ian.
Don't worry. I have lots of things planned, and the parts slowly starting to assemble.
I have cement patch for the basement floor.
I have sacks of fancy lime mortar for re-pointing the chimney.
I have fiberglass tape and joint compound for fixing cracks in the upstairs bedroom walls prior to paint.

There's a sale at Koopman's on Ben Moore paint next week. I might have to make some decisions. ($10 off a gallon for the first 5 gallons!)

I've been fighting the malaise of the weather and the dragging crud of allergies.
I've been wary of working outside because that only invites itching.
But this Saturday, I'm renting a truck, putting on my Tyvec suit, and getting rid of the piles of brush I've created. I can't afford the hundreds of dollars the landscapers wanted to do it, so I'll be as careful as possible.

Surprise Jack-in-the-Pulpit out by one of the brush piles.

Something a little different - bees for the farm

You know it's spring when bees hit the road.
I've been keeping bees for a few years at my parent's place. My sister and her husband built me the best bee yard, which is on the same line as the cattle fence. I call it the "Bee Fortress of Solitude."
The past number of winters have been pretty epic learning experiences.
You do not want to get into it with me about climate change. I will be (un)happy to point at hundreds of dollars worth of thousands of dead bees who couldn't winter over because of bonkers weather.
Right now, it's cold and wet and we have to feed the new bees like crazy because all the rain is literally washing the nectar out of the spring blooms.
Ahem.
Anyway.

New Bees!

You pick them up at night so that any of the bees that were out flying for food
in the daylight will be home in time to come along for the ride.

Trucks are the best way to do this. Ian and I get our bees from Hudson Valley Bee Supply. They've been great. I got 2 spring nucleus colonies, Ian got 3 overwintered nucs. I've also gotten bees from BetterBee before.
This year sees the introduction of top feeders to the operation. My first year we used entrance feeders, and they seemed to work fine. Every year since it's been a leaky, sticky mess. The bees must be fed, especially right now, so, we'll see.

A nuc sitting on top of it's hive.
A few years ago I got creative and painted some of the brood boxes.
It's been a long hard bee-time since, and I've lacked time and creativity to paint new ones.

Little faces in the top entrance after installation.

Here we go again.
Keep your fingers crossed.

At one point I was up to 6 hives. There's enough room in this yard to do 6 comfortably. 8 gets tight. I can only hope that my worries this year are about space and not disease, swarms, absconding, freezing, pests, etc.

Get into beekeeping, they said. It's a fun hobby, they said. You can make a little side money, they said.
It's been a lot of reading, trying to keep up with the most recent developments in management and medication, heartache and dead bees. When you have livestock, you have dead stock, but it doesn't get any easier when you crack into a hive and no one flies out to greet you.
Where once there was a hum, only silence.

The hum is back - let's hope this time I manage to beat the odds and get it right.

Call me The WeatherStripper

Because it feels like that's all I do for fun right now.
Saturday before I had to take off to do Bee Things, I rolled down to Koopmans to pick up the 3 screens I had them do. It cost $96, and they were done in less than a week. My first-time screening didn't look so bad in comparison, but where they had me beat was that they didn't tear the edges of the screen next to the spline.
The last of the fiberglass screens is now clad in aluminum, which means that short of damage I probably won't have to rescreen any more. Weatherstripping, on the other hand...
I started putting up the screens, but that means re-weather stripping. Some areas on the north side of the house still have their fuzz. But also have moss and lichens.

Something here is no factory original.

Some areas on the east and south of the house are so badly worn, it's not that there's no fuzz, it's that there's barely even a backer left in the channel.

That little black stitched looking line in the channel is all that's left of the weatherstripping.
The black stuff is aftermarket adhesive backed rubber the former owner tried to retrofit with.

At some point if the nice weather ever comes, I'm going to have to go window-by-window with the goo-gone (to get rid of prior attempts as fixing the windows), a bucket of soapy water (to clean the outside sash and window wells), a razor blade (to get rid of old caulk), and the caulking gun (to reseal it again.
There's a good argument for replacing some of the windows. The two in the master bedroom should be done, as the seal is shot in one of them. As I've mentioned, they are not quality windows.

I've found that if I use the short-fuzz (.25) weather stripping on the windows, and the long-fuzz (.4) weather stripping on the screens, it's enough to bridge the gap. I'm getting pretty good at it. I've only got 4 more windows to do, and I'll be done with the first floor.

Today I had the furnace cleaned. I had the receipt to show that it had been done in October before the house was sold, but I wanted to make sure it was ok. The filter situation had me a little concerned, and I wanted to see what he thought of the balance. He was able to fix the filter situation in about 3 minutes, gave me tips on balancing the system, and said that if I wanted to know about micro-ducts (for the bedrooms upstairs) I'd have to call and talk to a sales guy in the office. Super nice, answered all my questions and was pretty quick. Since my system is only hot air (no AC, no hot water) it doesn't get a huge amount of stress. Now I know that it takes 20x14" filters (x2). So I'll see about picking some of those up - the "filters" that are in there are really just good at "keeping squirels out" per the cleaner.
A few more flowers are up!

Tulip!