july 2007
july 24 2007 19:05 pdt as a general rule, if you have any choice in the matter it's probably not a good idea to be eating meat that comes out of cans anyhow.
july 21 2007 22:40 pdt we spent today in the backyard, banging on the house. one of the selling points of this place was that the shingles/roof looked pretty new, and so did the gutters. however, due to my inattention to detail and inexperience in shopping for houses when we saw the place in June of 06, we did not notice that the jackball redneck illiterate roofers who did the work had failed to install/replace the fascia behind the "new" gutters. i did notice at the time that the soffit seemed to hang down below the bottom of the gutter in one place on the front of the house, but i chalked that up to a problem with the soffit rather than a problem with the gutter. naturally, the reason the edge of the soffit was visible was becuase the piece of the house that is supposed to cover it up was in fact missing.
fast-forward five months from the closing to december, when it was raining every day (except for the days when it snowed a little). the gutters worked, in the sense that water ran down them to the downspouts without spilling into e.g. our living room. but the soffit problem bothered me more and more as time went on. should that wood be exposed? you could see the unpainted edge of the plywood from the street. it just wasn't right.
so last week we went and bought new 12' 1x6 fascia boards. today we took the gutter down off the back of the house (some pics over to the right). then we nailed up some of the new fascia, sealed the gaps, put the gutter back up, installed flashing to cover the transition between roof and gutter, and voila! ready for the rainy season. at least in the back yard, where nobody will see it. next we have to do the same thing to the front, which should cover up the ugly plywood so that it doesn't look like the soffit is sagging... and with what we learned from doing the back, the front should look pretty good when we're done.
ahh, the joys of home ownerhship. it's 11 pm, my hands are sore from the hammer and from getting scraped up on the grit from the shingles. we're both a little sunburned and totally exhausted. but this is one of the things we absolutely had to do before it started raining again, and with this out of the way maybe we'll be able to think seriously about starting that deck project we've been talking about.
of course i still want raised garden beds, and now that my tomato and pepper plants are ready for transplanting, pretty soon they're going to need somewhere to go. and the weather forecast last week did me good- when i saw on tuesday that it was supposed to rain for the next five days, i put down some new grass seed to cover some of the bare spots. today some of the first threads of new grass started to break through the bark dust. there is still a wide swath near the street where the lawn just never came in properly- i blame that weekend in sun river for burning it so that it couldn't germinate. but once things start to get a little wetter in the fall, or if we have a couple of overcast days in a row again, maybe i can replant that strip too and the grass will start to look like we know how to take care of it.
july 17 2007 23:00 pdt for future reference, i really can carry 12-foot lumber on the roof rack of my car.
july 17 2007 13:17 pdt i will not eat any more high-fructose corn syrup. in fact, no more corn syrup of any kind. and while we're at it, let's end government subsidies to corn farmers. find something better to do with your time, guys. and here's a hint: i don't want ethanol in my gasoline either.
july 16 2007 23:29 pdt today i saw three tree frogs and one garter snake in the backyard. the tomatos and the peppers i planted in the "greenhouse" are growing famously. unfortunately the fig cuttings i took all seem to have died. but today i pulled up next to someone else's giant manicured fig tree and pulled a couple of suckers out of the ground where they had already formed some weak roots, and repotted them in fertile and sterile potting soil. so maybe that will produce a tree for me.
and today i took cuttings from the hydrangea that was growing explosively up against the house. i did like the websites say, and cut back two leaf nodes from new growth and then buried them in potting soil. one of these days i'm going to have to empty out the compost pile and make my own potting mix- but if i ever get around to building out some new raised beds, maybe the guy with the truck will solve that problem for me.
july 7 2007 14:58 pdt the days are doing a 30-point temperature swing right now. mornings are below 60 degrees. by four in the afternoon, it's almost 90.
my late tomato seeds have all sprouted, and the peppers are coming up too. i tore out the last of the spinach, picked another quart of green beans, and planted the romanesco broccoli where the spinach had been.
not sure the figs are going to make it. probably should have just kept them in the shade until they rooted, instead of putting them out in the greenhouse where they could burn. also, probably too late now to do anything but try again later.
july 7 2007 10:17 pdt june went fast. july is running by too. today is 7/7/07, the luckiest day of the century. if you haven't done so already you should go buy a lottery ticket.
we're going to rest up a little bit, and maybe go buy some paint later on, and then off to a bbq party for one of my classmates. lots of work on the house over the past three or four weeks, so now we need to reset for a little while and consider priorities and finances to decide what to do next.
the kitchen is probably off the list. too much work, too much money to do right now. and we're holding on the deck for the time being- we have a concept, and we've even agreed on what the layout might be like, but the cost of actually buying the materials has us a little daunted. i'm still not 100% sure we have the numbers worked out correctly, and i would hate to put us back in the place we were with the floors again. (that is, 9/10ths of the way done, but totally paralyzed as to how to finish and waiting for dad to come and rescue us). i still have some visions of garden beds in the back, but now that the summer is getting along, i'm not so eager to start more vegetables so that they can just die when the first frost rolls around.
so maybe we'll do some painting. we powerwashed the house on friday, so it's ready to go. and p's dad had a great idea about fixing up the trim on the front of the house so that it looks finished, instead of how it looks now where the soffett hangs down a little bit past the line of the gutters- he suggested we just buy some new 1x6 facing and nail it up there, and then paint it the same as the rest of the trim, and reinstall the gutter over that. it will look like we meant to do it.
