Yard Rennovation

I have been long overdue for updating my more recent efforts on the house. One of the biggest renovations was too big for me in terms of shear time. I have spent many long hours since purchasing this house removing old plant life such as trees, ivy, and bushes.

With little Apollo in the picture, it was time to bring in some help and get the job done faster. The team was able to remove the remaining plants and the fences and dig up the soil to prepare for the new sod all in one day.

While the guys were working on all of that, I decided to save some money buy removing the three stumps in the back by myself. I regret that decision because these stumps and their root systems where a colossal pain to remove. I will be paying for stump removal in the future.

The next day the new irrigation system for the grass and the new fence posts went in. Apollo wanted to help when I came home for his lunch time walk, but he was too young so we just watched. The next day the remaining fence went in, including a new fence line along the driveway.

Over the weekend we took on the task of staining the fence. This gives it a nice look and also protects the untreated cedar boards from the elements. This is a very easy task that simply takes some time, but if you put on some tunes and have some fun with it, totally worth the cost savings. The hard part is choosing the stain color.

I did not finish the staining before the week started, when the crew turned to putting in the new sod, but I at least finished the inside so the sod could go in easily. It looks amazing and almost fake when it is brand new. It of course won't always look this good, but it is a fun way to start. We added small stones as a walkway from the driveway gate to the main entry path.

In the back yard I noticed that the gas and water lines from the house to the garage for the washer and dryer we exposed and looked ugly. Together with the crew we extended all three lines under ground and buried them.

With the lines buried and the exterior of the fence painted, this project is complete. Now there is plenty of safe room to play frisbee with Apollo.

Bedroom Closet Shelving

Now that the walls are complete I can start the installation of the shelving unit. Once I've built the first level of the 12" wide shelf, I realize there is a problem. This is an old house and the flooring and walls are not quite level. Of course this is not a problem in and of itself, but if this shelf starts off uneven, it will become a problem at the top. So the solution was to put in a full length shelf at the bottom to give a level platform. Also, this separates some room on the floor for shoes or other small storage items.

With this solution complete, I can install the first three shelves, the clothes rail, and the full length shelf above. Then with a ladder, I can repeat on the middle shelf, installing the three narrow shelves, then the clothes rail, and finally an upper shelf. The top shelf is quite high and does not have a lot of vertical space, so it will mainly be for longer term storage.

Bedroom Closet Patching

After all of the demo and mudding, it takes about 12-18 hours for the mud to dry. The dry time depends on thickness. After it drys, I sand it down tediously until it seems mostly level with the wall. The sanding produces a lot of dust, so it's important to wear something over your mouth and nose. Can't do much about the layer of dust on the arms though. Then I rinse and repeat, filling in the holes and cracks with more mud in order to sand again. I did this for 3 days before completing the drywall and being able to paint. The bottom right image shows the closet after the whole wall patching process is complete.

Bedroom Closet Demo

This is the first legitimate project in a while. I am going to demo the bedroom closet and install a nice space-efficient closet unit in order to maximize the space. Currently there is one shelf and one clothes bar in the closet. This makes it impossible to use the space high in the closet and painful to use the space low in the closet. With such a small house, maximizing storage is essential.


To start with I use my crow bar and hammer to remove the shelf and support boards. These must have been original because the demo reveals the plaster on the wall with no paint over it. I also remove the window sill and the casing around the window. While this window does provide some light, it is not worth the space on the wall, so I am filling the gap with drywall. Time will tell if an addition of a closet light will be required. After cutting and installing the drywall piece (with the back side painted bright white, even though this window is barely visible from the outside), I apply a large amount of mud to all the damaged areas. This will take most of the week in the evenings to cycle through sanding and mudding until there is a fairly smooth surface remaining.

Dining Room and Arbor

This weekend was a chance to clean up some loose ends before our big party. First up is some inside tasks. Setting up the coffee station is not a particularly necessary addition, but I sure do love my coffee. And the dining room light was not installed for way too long. So I finally decided to transfer one light from the guest room to the dining room and eventually I'll transfer my bedroom light to the guest room to put in a ceiling fan light in my bedroom.

Out in the yard I worked on the old and dying key lime tree that is right in the way. Some time with the chainsaw and that thing is gone. Just need to use some stump out to get rid of the stump.

Meanwhile Kara was working on out of control ivy over the gate and arbor and along the fence. After some preliminary trimming it became clear that we shouldn't bother keeping the ivy over the arbor. So a little trim became a complete hack job of "side show bob" but at least it's done. Most likely the arbor will have to go too.

Side Yard and Ivy

My pops is in town visiting, so after some golf and some dinners out, it's time to do some fun yard work. And boy did we have some fun back there. First we went to town on some stumps. We cut the tops off and then drilled a bunch of wholes in the tops of the stumps. Then we dumped some "stump out" into the wholes and added water. The idea is this should rot the stump from the inside so we can easily grind it up and just put soil over it. Time will tell how well this works.

While we were doing this Kara was working on the ivy along the side fence. The goal was just to clean this up so it looked nicer, but at some point I wondered, what would happen if I messed with some of the vines on the other side of the fence. I pulled on one and the whole thing started to go. Turns out there was a solid 3 feet of dead vines growing on the side of the fence. Unfortnuately this little find meant hours of clean up followed by a future trip to the dump.

The benefit is that the yard actually looks under control and the fence will be much easier to tear down when I am finally ready to level the ground out and put in a nice new vinyl fence. Plus we found this little lizard friend. Or I should say Kara found it and freaked way out, running down her ladder and across the yard. :)

Front Yard Bushes

The front yard was full of succulents, weeds, overgrown bushes, and vines. At the start of this day, we were hoping to get  everything trimmed back to decide how to proceed. After a couple hours of work, we decided to just get rid of it all, moving towards a blank canvas. First we began weeding the main yard full of vines and digging up stumps from dead bushes near the house. Then, I cut down the two bushes bordering the walkway while Kara continued pulling vines and trimming back the vine plants near the fence to reveal another bush. We ripped out the third bush and cleaned up the rest of the front yard, leaving the side yard for another day. In the end we had around 12 bags of debris.