Blog de Puree » Home improvement

Protected: M supervises Daddy’s window work

paul — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:58:42 +0000

Our boxwood shrubs-a year later

paul — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:00:15 +0000

After purchasing and planting our ‘Winter Gem’ boxwood shrubs from Lowe’s last year (See last year’s blog post here), we are happy to see that our border experiment is working.

To start, we planted what we called the “Boxwood shade gardens,” one on each side of our front steps to fill in the area that was formerly taken up by overgrown Yews. We planted a variety of flowers and flowering plants to provide color from early spring into mid fall. You can read about our shade gardens here.

Once the flowers were planted, life with these two gardens became a simple matter of routine maintenance, such as weeding, chipping and so on.

Now, more than a year later, the boxwoods themselves are thriving and we have nearly achieved the look we were going for in the original post, which was to have a continuous line of boxwood to server as a planting bed border. The boxwoods have not completely filled in yet, but we expect that to take another year or two because we did not put them in root ball to root ball. However, the ‘Winter Gem’ varietal does grow to three feet spread, so we’re not too concerned about the space filling in. Also, they were trimmed in the spring and already will easily need another trimming in the spring of next year.

Installing a new cat door

paul — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:14:43 +0000

“It’s time to install a cat door,” Randye sighed. “I’m sick of people coming to the house and looking into our messy laundry room.”

“I’m sure they don’ t mind,” I replied, thinking it wasn’t a big deal.

“Well, whether they do or not isn’t really the main point,” she responded. “I don’t want our son crawling in there and shoveling handfuls of cat litter into his mouth because he thinks the texture is really cool.”

And so I installed the cat door…

After purchasing the cat door for “bigger cats” and paying extra money in shipping because Bouche is such a fat $%#@, and the fact that we couldn’t find a local store that carried doors for the feline version of big and tall men, I declared war on my poor laundry room door.

I tried three makeshift, homemade methods of measuring and stenciling a circle for the initial cut and settled on a stencil made from a leftover pizza box. I took my drill and made a number of small holes next to each other along the top line of the stenciled circle. I drilled enough holes to fit the plastic/particle board blade for my Craftsman reciprocating saw. I sent Randye and our baby boy upstairs and waded in, sawing a circle within the inner frame of the door.

When the dust settled, I took a step back to check out my handy work and was rather impressed that I didn’t destroy the door.

A cat’s-eye view of the door hole.

The next step involved wrestling with the miscellaneous pieces of cat door to get them together from both sides of the door. Then it was a matter of getting the four screws in and fastening the cat door frame together.

I must be honest. It was surprisingly easy. I started the job with some trepidation after reading countless nightmare reviews from cat door purchasers, but my experience was not so bad. And the end product is not too shabby.

The paper towels are for cat drool on the door.

Product design: FAIL

randye — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:13:29 +0000

I’m not even sure I know how to tag this one. (It would probably be more appropriate when our blog was called “The Hot Poop.”) But here goes.

As a huge fan of interior design, I love hearing about new products for the home. Some are certainly more interesting than others and this one is a doozey. Interesting? Sure. Ridiculous? DEFINITLY!

So, with Valentine’s Day around the corner, I give you the ultimate “romantic” household item: The TwoDaLoo.

“The TwoDaLoo is billed as the world’s first toilet two people can use … at the exact same time. It brings couples closer together and conserves our water supply all with one flush. The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.”

Riiiiigghhhht.

Paul, sweetie. I’ll save you the $1400! I’ll take a box of candy instead.

What freedom from foreign oil dependence looks like

paul — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:00:05 +0000

This is the corner of our basement where the oil tank used to be. Now it will become a clean, non-smelly, dry storage space.

What freedom from foreign oil dependence looks like.

We now have a new natural gas boiler. It uses gas piped in from our peaceful neighbors to the north, Canada. It’s also about 50% more efficient than the old oil burner, and a heck of a lot quieter. We’ve taken another small step to reduce our carbon footprint on the planet. And while we realize that the emissions may be the same as using oil, the huge pipe that brings our natural gas is far more environmental that getting the oil from the ground in a foreign nation, bringing it to America by ship, processing it and then trucking it to our neck of the woods.

To say that we are excited for our home to be free from the volatile world oil market is an understatement. Take that foreign oil companies and Bush Administration!

(Special thanks to Burdick Plumbing of Amesbury who did an awesome job of replacing our boiler. Burdick Plumbing was attentive to our needs, informative about our options and did great work in a timely manner for a reasonable amount of money. If anyone is looking for a plumber in the Amesbury area, we highly recommend them.)

A dash of Gloucester granite to the stone wall

paul — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:40:24 +0000

We made more progress on our stone wall this week.

A colleague and good friend of mine lives near some deserted granite quarries in Gloucester. After talking about the slow progress of our stone wall, she offered all the rocks I could fit in my car from the huge pile of rock and granite near the back of her property. I was amazed at all the deserted rough chunks of material from the old quarries, some of which was dug up during her yard projects and the rest which was just strewn about the area from past quarry operations.

After a little research, I discovered that Gloucester had a booming granite trade in the 19th and early 20th century, with over 25 small quarries around the Cape Ann peninsula. Once residents and businessmen realized that the precious stone could be quarried from the area, granite became another mainstay of the Gloucester economy, in addition to its fishing industry, until the 1930′s. However, there has been no major quarrying in the area since. Today, there is only one functioning quarry in the area.

According to the Annisquam Granite Company website, much of it is now “extinct, overgrown, paved over, filled with water, fenced off, taken for municipal property, buried under condo developments, or otherwise generally lost.” I also discovered that most of the granite for the Charlestown and Portsmouth Navy yards was from Gloucester.

I was like a kid in a candy shop. The only thing that stopped me was the need to prevent the tailpipe of my car all the way back to Amesbury from Cape Ann.

Once the rock and granite was safely back at our yard, it was time for a bit of wall reorganization. I took the pristine river and beach rock from the bottom middle rows (There’s only one row at this point) and used the Gloucester granite to take it’s place as base stone and filler. Then I started completing the final outside row. Now the bottom layer of the entire wall is almost finished.

I can also now brag that we have a stone wall made of famous Gloucester granite and finely smoothed sea and river rock.

(Sorry, no pictures. Did you really want to look at a pile of rocks?)

A busy Sunday

paul — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:14:05 +0000

Sunday stated innocently enough. After I hearty breakfast, we went to Lowe’s. When we left Lowe’s, our car was weighed down with two plastic shelving systems, shutters to replace the broken blinds in the bathroom and thin plastic threshold strips to be used in the mudroom.

Once we arrived home from the market, my day consisted of working with those three items.

First I took down the broken blinds in the bathroom, which I replaced with colonial style indoor shutters. The don’t extend from completely from top to bottom of the window frame, but go up about 2/3. We did this on purpose so that there would privacy, while allowing some natural light coming in through the window during the day or light from the street lamp over on Currier Ave. Now we don’t have to use a night light in the bathroom. (Actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. would be proud of us.)

Once that task was finished, it was time to replace the botched threshold job I did in the mudroom. When we first installed our upright washer/dryer unit, we had to cut away a portion of the carpet so that it rested on the original linoleum floor underneath. (We think that section of the house used to be part of the old bathroom). But that left loose ends of carpet. I tried installing aluminum thresholds, but cutting the corners was a bear without proper tools and we ended up with sharp and dangerous ends. This time around, I used rubber/plastic material that cut easily with a utility knife. And if I say so myself, the end result looks 10 times better, and the corners of the plastic is so much easier on my toes.

After a quick lunch break, it was time to tackle the basement. After two renovation projects—the kitchen and the closets—it was a mess of siding, unused wood and other miscellaneous items strewn about in piles. With the upcoming fall rains, the need to get everything off the floor is paramount. I had to move a large pile of vinyl siding, fence posts and boards, and miscellaneous scrap wood to another section of the basement. Then it was time to sweep the area, and afterward, I built and placed the plastic shelves. I then played scrap wood Tetris for about two hours, to get all the siding and wood off the floor. This also included three wood doors, aluminum shutters, a rowing scull rack and two bike racks.

But the problem with basements is that while you’re doing one project, you always find more. So, I was compelled to get the old broken clothes dryer ready for transport to the local scrap metal yard. (I hauled this away in my trusty VW Golf on Monday.) And the shelves with our gardening supplies needed to be reorganized, stuff for an upcoming possible yard sale was moved out of the basement. If Randye hadn’t called me out of the basement, I believe I would have been there for the better part of the night.

I’m just glad that I had Monday off from work.

Finally, the boxwood shrubs are planted!

paul — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:14:24 +0000

Two months after making my original order for 25 boxwood shrubs with Lowes, they finally arrived. It was the wrong cultivar and size, but as it is August, with the growing season closing fast and the fact that this variety is still evergreen in our particular zone, I threw up my hands and bought them anyway.

Despite the fact that it was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had, which includes a pathetic lack of communication from the manager who made the order and his poor handling of trying to ship the plants I wanted from other stores, he did right by me in the end, and sold me 3-gallon $19 plants for the price of the 1-gallon $6 plants.

So, instead of the Buxus microphylla japonica ‘Wintergreen’ boxwoods, which are very cold hardy, great for creating hedges and great for pruning, we now have the Buxus microphylla ‘Winter Gem’ variety. The Winter Gem is almost as hardy as the former, and is also great for hedges and trimming. While the differences are small, especially as you compare other details between the two, they are important for serious and semi-serious gardeners and growers.

When we went to pick them up, the manager who had sold us the shrubs asked us if we had a pickup truck to bring them all home. “Nah,” I calmly said. “I’ve got a VW Golf.” He raised an eyebrow and offered to watch those that couldn’t fit in the car for the first trip, until we came back for the 2nd trip. The employee who helped us load them from the rack to our VW Golf told us that his buddy, who happened to be hanging around, was skeptical that we’d be able to fit them all in at once. But they didn’t know what our little bat could do. (That’s what we call the black Golf.) In the end, we squeezed 24 in the back, creating a small boxwood forest and fit one, well, check the pictures.

(24 3-gallon boxwood shrubs crammed into the back of our trusty VW Golf.)

(And the final shrub in the front of the car, with Randye.)

In the end, Randye and I are quite pleased with the outcome. I spent five hours on Sunday morning planting all 25 of them in front of the house, in the spot where the gigantic yew bushes used to grow. Now we have two rounded border areas for planting tall and colorful shade-tolerant flowers that will bloom from spring to late summer. And when those die back, we still have the evergreen color of the boxwoods. Of course, it’s all according to our master yard plan, which I’ve included at the end of this post. Here’s how I planted the shrubs. (Queue music, please.)

(The front of the house, before I started, and how it looked for weeks before the shrubs arrived. Bare and ugly.)

(Another shot, before I started at 8:30 a.m. The growth that you do see here is weeds.)

(I started with digging the ditch on the left side of the front steps, battling my way through residual roots systems from the old yew bushes)

(Then I dug the ditch on the right side of the front steps. The ditches on both sides were about a foot deep—the height of the 3-gallon pots. As I was planting so many shrubs together, about 4 to 6 inches apart (almost root ball to root ball), it was easiest to just dig a trench in the shape that I wanted to plant the shrubs.)

(The finished product, about 4-and-a-half hours later. The shrubs make a gentle curve around the sides of the house, creating deep planting beds behind in which to grow tall and colorful flowers. The shrubs will grow in, creating a continuous wall of shrub that creates a solid evergreen border for the new flower bed.)

(Here’s a layout, courtesy of the magazine Cottage Living, where we got the idea to have flower beds outside the windows bordered by evergreen boxwood shrubs.)

(With a year or two of growth and some careful pruning, our shrubs and flower bed should look a little like this photo, also courtesy of Cottage Living. We’re going to plant a variety of tall flowers that will bloom in the spring, mid or late summer. We’ll also probably plant a low purplish ground cover in front of the shrubs to create a sense of colorful depth and drama.)

A construction-filled Saturday

paul — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 02:40:45 +0000

Saturday was a busy day on the home improvement front. Randye and I feverishly worked on a myriad of small projects that needed our attention. Here’s the list:

Install a final shelf in master bedroom closet. With some of the scrap wood left from the closet refurb a few weeks back, we crafted supports and a shelf to mirror the same look as the rest of the closet.
We chipped and scraped the old latex paint off the nursery radiator, then spray painted it with a high-heat durable gray color to match the radiator in the new kitchen.
We disassembled and painted the dresser that will become our forthcoming rugrat’s changing table with a dark blue enamel paint to match the bed. It took two coats because of the finish of the furniture, but thankfully the stickiness of the enamel paint held strong. The fumes brought back memories of my model-building days when I used enamel paints to spruce up battleships, fighter planes and army tanks.
Using white trim paint, I went around the house touching up the trim areas that had chipped, smudged or needed a general cleaning.
We removed the hardware from the ugly, old horizontal blinds, spackled and painted over the holes, then installed blackout shades so that Randye and the wee beastie could nap comfortably during the day. I also discovered that I’m completely inept with using blackout shades, but Randye has some odd, innate talent and she can operate them flawlessly.
We installed a full-length mirror on the door of the tall Ikea armoire.

At the end of the day, we mustered enough strength to shower, eat a pizza and drool on the couch for an hour before collapsing into bed.

Painting the nursery, part deux

randye — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:55:10 +0000

Just wanted to add that Paul’s photos make the blue look much brighter than it is — in reality, it’s a soft sky blue. Oh, and lest anyone think potential motherhood has pushed my decorating style over to the “sweet” or “cute” side (quel horreur!*), we’ll be balancing the look with some of my trademark orange to keep it a little more modern and fresh.

These two images are the room’s inspiration.

Who’da thunk Martha Stewart would utilize the Eames rocker (that I covet) so well?

As a (graphic and interior) designer, I love the use of typography as a design element in this contest-winning mood board. Using letters could be a nice playful touch in the nursery, no? Using my (usually-trustworthy) large-format inkjet printer, I certainly could create some inexpensive letter art out of the wee beastie’s name .

Now, if we could only decide on the wee beastie’s name as easily as we came up with a decorating scheme .

*This entire post is created with my proverbial tongue firmly implanted in my proverbial cheek.