More Yard

We put in another full weekend of work on the yard. This included two trips to Home Depot and a whole lot of manual labor.

I feel like this is becoming more of a photo blog: high on images, low on commentary. It's probably what folks are more interested in anyway, assuming anyone is interested at all (Hi Laura!).

Unrelated to the yard, another project we worked on this weekend was finalizing our bike theft deterrent system. After two thefts, we wanted to come up with something really solid. We researched the actual bike racks, but they were very pricey. So we bought a $10 fence post instead and then modified it. Here is Seth working on drilling through the post:

It was tough to find the right combination of tools (thank you again to the kind folks at the Tool Lending Library), but we finally got it working and it doesn't look half bad:

Back to the yard. It started with a little late night painting from Ilana, who "rescued" this old trellis from abadonment:

The next day, Seth stacked the stones:

This was the reason for two trips to Home Depot. These are ridiculously heavy, and moving them from the HD shelf to the cart, from the cart to the car, and the car to the yard takes a toll. Not to mention hammering some of them down so they fit on the ends. We then placed a planter box (a modified bench I built for Ilana, which itself was modified wood from an old model train layout) behind the stones and placed Ilana's painted trellis inside (with dirt, of course). Next we planted our new Star Jasmines, which Ilana then tied to the trellis.

The jasmine smells great, and helps us prove to Amanda that you don't need to buy a house just because the yard smells good. While Ilana worked on that, I hung our new cafe lights:

Here's the final product, with Ilana resting in the background:

And just for the comparison shot from earlier photos, here's the view from above:

And for the finale, here's the night shot with the cafe lights on:

Bonus Photo:

(Seymour looking at the lights)

A Box for a Box (and an Old Friend)

We took on a new small project this weekend: we built a box for a box. Keep reading to find out why.

Here I am putting the final touches on a very simple wood box.





And here Ilana is putting in the parquet flooring (stick 'em squares, really).















And here is the purpose. Look at the bottom of the photo: the box is on the floor. Now that we removed the water heater from the upstairs closet (did we mention that we got a tankless water heater installed?), we decided to use the space for storage and to move Seymour's litter upstairs. The homemade box will help keep excess litter from getting into places it shouldn't. Moving the litter will allow us to lock him upstairs when guests are over, and adds more space to the tiny downstairs bathroom.



We also finally finished the kitchen.

All that means is that we re-installed our old friend the paper towel holder from the original kitchen in its near original location. It's pretty much the only item that survived from what was in the kitchen when we moved in. Ilana repainted it and insisted we put it back as an homage, but it's also pretty functional and officially marks that the kitchen is d-o-n-e.