Brave Hunters & Hunting Cabins

Back on Mars today. No projects around the house -- too busy doing laundry from the trip & resting up for the work week. Adrienne had the great idea to take Zoey to a nearby state park, so we did that, too, to take advantage of unbelievably warm weather. Here's a brave dog, wading into the ocean for the first time in her life:

She had fun splashing around, & chasing the lizards & squirrels in the park. She thinks she's a crack hunter, but luckily for us -- and the lizards & squirrels -- she's not.

In other news, while in NH, I got to pitch in on someone else's home improvement project: my dad is refinishing the walls in a half (quarter?) bath he has off the kitchen.

Mostly I held the flashlight & the tools, & held panels up to be nailed in, but it was fun working with him, & it was great experience to learn how to do a thing like this. I even learned how to install a light fixture without killing myself. Hey!

And, like a project on Mars, there were unforeseen obstacles that took time & creativity to get around. The piece of ceiling trim on the left of this picture took a whole day to put up, & involved nails, screws, and a pair of toggle bolts:

He's almost done. Just waiting for the weather to clear, so that he can stain the rest of the trim. Then it's just a matter of putting it up, & replacing the cover on the electrical panel.

It's funny that I'm trying to get rid of our wood paneling, while my dad is putting it up at his house. This lighter shade is much better than the old, dark stuff we have, though, and having it on the ceiling, too, makes it look a little like something in a hunting cabin.

Back to work tomorrow, & back to Mars projects. Next, I think I'm going to finally get back to painting over all that pink trim.

Helpful Dog!

Even though she's sad to see me go away for two weeks, Zoey is being a trouper by helping with the laundry and packing.

"It just wouldn't be right if you left here & didn't smell like me."

Farmer Brown's Summer Harvest

The summer's vegetable experimental plantings have done well, & I have learned a lot about what will do well & where.

Favas did fairly well on the front porch:

Destined for the roasting pan!

The planters I had them in were too small, & while favas tolerate some shade, most of the porch is perhaps too shady. Next time, I will put them in the back yard.

Here is a little box full of the bounty of our garden, put together for a long-lost friend who came over for coffee:

Carrots, mint, lemon verbena, cilantro, roses.

The carrots were wonderfully sweet, but didn't reach their full length because I didn't prepare a deep enough bed. More digging in my future! And/or buying seeds for one of those little stubby varieties instead. The cilantro did surprisingly well in a little shady spot under the lemon verbena, so more to go in there next time, as well.

Later today, I head off to go enjoy the bounty of autumn in New England for two weeks. More updates from Mars when I return!

Birthday!

Friday was the most important day of the year: my birthday!

Adrienne threw me the dinner party of dinner parties: Breakfast for Dinner, featuring Rochette's should-be-famous-they're-so-good bean recipe from Lowell, & several of the best people ever born.

Here are some photos:

The beans go in the slow cooker with a bunch of salt pork & a tiny bit of ketchup. Nine hours later: magic!

The vegetarian-friendly version.

Scrambling is in your future.

English muffins!

Fancy butter!

Champagne!

Sugar cubes & bitters for champagne cocktails!

Susie & I having lively conversation in the kitchen. I am wearing my excellent new pitbull-with-a-halo t-shirt that Amanda & Matt gave me.

Zoey had fun at the party too, working to get some biscuits out of a toy.

For the non-champagne-inclined, gin & sodas with borage flower ice cubes.

The cooking begins!

I was in such heaven with the meal that I forgot to take photos of it before we had devoured everything. Including the gorgeous steamed pudding that Paul made for dessert! How tragic!

Here is something else that Paul (& Susie!) made:

A special birthday edition of Mr Pickles ginger beer! 

I also received a bounty of flowers from Robin.

A good time was had by all. Thank you for celebrating my birthday with me, everyone! Thank you for throwing such a great party, Adrienne! And thank you for all your hard work cleaning up the aftermath:

Zoey's Airplane

We needed more dog food. We decided that instead of borrowing a car to go get another 30-pound bag (& figuring out how to pack in yet another errand), we would just order one from Amazon. That worked out great, although it came in a box the size of a coffin. I was about to cut the box up to put out with the recycling, when I thought it might be fun to make something out of it first, & see if I could put the dog in it & snap a photo. Because, really, why not?

This is Zoey's airplane. I made it in a couple hours on Labor Day:

This is what Zoey had to say about the second part of the idea:

You want me to what?

I'm going to put it out on the driveway with a "free" sign on it this weekend, in case some family with little kids passing by would like to have it to play in.

And also...

And also, I started mulching the rose bushes with cut up wine & champagne corks that I've been saving for a while & meaning to recycle.

Only had enough to do one. Better get drinking!

Garden Project!

We decided to postpone painting Adrienne's office -- she had too much work to do this weekend, so rather than try to squeeze the project in & end up stressed out, yelling at each other about the proper technique for painting trim, we decided to just put it off for another weekend.

Instead, I took advantage of some excellent weather & tackled a yard project that's been on my mind for a couple weeks: turning the panda corner into a little reading/meditation/morning coffee/sitting spot.

As you can see, the placement of the lemon verbena, hibiscus-like plant, & two rose bushes set this corner sort of awkwardly apart from the rest of the yard, making it basically unusable as-is:

View when you enter the yard.

View from the side.

What's back there: ten square feet of grass & spiders.

I've been reading two books about garden design that gave me the idea for the project. One pointed out that even in a small yard, it's nice to have multiple places to sit & view the rest of the garden from different vantage points, and the other is all about landscaping for privacy in dense environments. I realized that I could take advantage of the fact that this corner is set apart & a little hidden, & turn it into a cozy spot to sit. The added bonus is that it is one of the only spots in the yard that gets bright, direct light in the morning, & the only one that gets light shade in the afternoon. 

Another thing I've been thinking a lot about is finding ways to repurpose random stuff that was left in the house when we moved in: scraps of wood, cracked flower pots, a tire, a name plate from the tailgate of a Nissan pickup truck, an old headboard, etc.  

I was planning to take apart the headboard & build a bench, when, sitting out in the yard with Adrienne & our friend Brian on Saturday, I saw the tire through the window of the Haunted Garden Shed, & realized that would fit the spot perfectly, while the flower pots sitting next to it could be broken up to make some sort of paving material.

On the way out this morning to start the project, I took the recycling with me, & I remembered something else I read this week about burying wine bottles bottom-up for a paving sort of effect -- we've had folks over a couple times this week, so there were a handful of wine bottles in there, & I have plenty of beer bottles of all shapes & sizes that I keep handy for homebrewing, so I thought it would be worth a try to see if I could make something interesting. Why not?

Here's what I did, (more or less) step by step:

Step One -- cut back the rose bushes, clear out grass & spiders:

The rose bushes attacked me, but this was the easy part...

Step Two -- put the tire in place, & dig a hole for the bottles:

This was the hard part --  it's all hard-packed clay & inch-thick roots down there. 

I bet it took me an hour to dig just 12 inches down.

Meanwhile, my friends were there keeping me company & cheering me on:

"Be mindful of your back!" said Zoey.

Step Three -- setting the bottles into a design:

Finally the fun part!

The stick is there to help me get them level with the ground.

In the end, I decided it might be more interesting to leave them at different levels.

Step Four -- smash smash smash!

Big, medium, & small!

In the spirit of repurposing as much of what we found here as possible, I also added all the bits of glass & pottery that we've found around the yard over the past nine months (!) since we moved in.

Step Five -- build a small wall on the side, with bricks found in the yard & Haunted Garden Shed:

Sorry, forgot to take a photo. Here is somebody else's photo of a brick.

Step Six -- step back & take some photos of the finished product:

Done!

A little closer in...

There's the brick wall -- a visual boundary, & also a convenient place for a drink.

View from the side.

I think I would like to plant a berry bush or something in front of the brick wall at some point.

Step Seven -- that rim inside the tire isn't going to be comfy, so make a cushion:

Old blanket we moved in with, rolled & tied up like the spiral rugs we had when I was growing up.

Old towel sewn on as a cover.

Beginning to end, I think it took me about six hours, maybe seven, to finish. I ought to sleep well tonight! 

And be sore tomorrow.

Speaking of sleeping well, after all that hard work outside, Zoey was exhausted. She came back inside & settled down for a long nap in the corner of the couch:

I knew it had been a while...

...but I didn't realize it had been a whole month since I last posted! Four different people have asked after the blog in the last week -- I've been busy with work and with dog training, & Adrienne started the school year on August 13, so we just haven't been doing much bloggable work around the house.

We did, however, get one thing done this month that I've been meaning to post about for two weeks -- electrical work!

The system was upgraded from a fuse box to modern circuit breakers by a licensed electrician in 2007, but the entire back of the house -- the kitchen, Adrienne's office, the sun porch, & one of the outlets in the bedroom -- was on just one circuit. Already a less than ideal situation. Then, Mr. Bunkport had to monkey with the system when he rebuilt the structure under Adrienne's office so that the refrigerator would still run while they were working -- he's a licensed contractor & knows what he's doing...but let's face it: he's not an electrician, and things were not quite right back there after he finished. He came back twice, and couldn't figure out what the problem was, but things seemed to be fine when we just left everything unplugged. We figured we save energy that way anyway, so let's just sit tight, continue to save our money, & then get an electrician in when we go to redo the back of the house, since we'll want to have more circuits added at that time anyway. This sounds ridiculous as I'm typing this (hello, fires?), but it made sense at the time.

Then in mid-August, things started acting funny again, so we decided to just bite the bullet & bring an electrician in to tell us what is going on. I got a referral from our friend Amanda, who works for our Realtor® & knows all the best tradesmen. Our Realtor® is herself a landlord, so in addition to referrals, she sends a lot of work to these folks herself. And they all know that if she catches wind of a client done wrong, that's the end of the line, so that's a level of assurance for us.

He came right over, & confirmed that sure enough, that one circuit is overloaded, & also general contractors, while super at building things, don't always make great decisions with rewiring. He suggested adding 2 more circuits to the house to solve both problems, but also said that if we wanted to wait until we redo the back of the house, that would be ok as long as we were careful about how much we were plugging in at one time.

Then, the next morning, he called me back. He said that he was talking about the house the night before, had decided that there was actually a safety issue here, & to encourage us to get the work done now, he offered to knock 25% off the price he had quoted me. He also offered to come do the work the next day. Sounds scammy, but this guy is not at all hurting for work, and he comes to us from the very best source possible, so we agreed. Better safe than sorry, & that discount really helped take the sting out.

The next morning, he came at 9am, with his wife Connie in tow. At one point during the day, I said to her that this seems like interesting work. She answered that she thinks it's horribly boring, but Samson was worried about us, & had asked her to come help him so that he could bring the cost down, instead of his having to pay his usual guys for their labor.

Also, when he was leaving at 4:30pm (!), he told me that our Realtor® had called him after we'd already agreed on the discounted cost, & asked him to knock the price down further to help us out -- he said that he couldn't cut the price more, but instead installed a third circuit & replaced our counter-top kitchen outlets with those circuit-breaking safety outlets for no charge.

So, now, not only are we sitting in a safer house, we're actually all set up for a kitchen remodel that we'll hopefully do in 5 or 6 years. Another happy ending on Mars!

Here are our brand new circuit breakers (the ones with the black marker):

And here are our new outlets.

Tomorrow, we are going to start finishing & painting Adrienne's office, so stay tuned for more posts this week!