Part 1: An epic battle to conquer the underdwellings of our house

Thus far I've been highlighting pretty things like the garden and kitchen. But truth be told we've spent most of our summer battling the not so pretty updates. Enter: basement, garage, and rain gutters.

It all started when we had finally finished enough of the work upstairs that we could start cleaning up and putting away tools which had taken up residency in the dining room. We bundled up the handy helpers and escorted them to the garage...only to find ourselves admitting that we simply could not ignore what a hellhole it was. Shelves were falling off the wall, torn out cabinets stacked to the ceiling, supplies strewn about. It was, quite simply, horrific.

We resolved to put away our tools in an organized garage, where the chances of finding them again were exponentially greater. (Of course this means tools had to live somewhere in the meantime so those were parked in the basement.)

We didn't have an open length of time to fix up the garage all at once so we've been operating in an iterative manner. Mark moved everything away from the south wall and took down shelving one night. Then a few days later I cleaned the empty wall, patched it, sanded it, and painted (a high gloss bright white for optimal light in what can most accurately be described as a cave). Once I finished that over the course of a few days, Mark came back and assembled shelves/whatever and organized the stuff for that wall. And then we repeated that entire cycle for the east wall.

Here's the last wall yet to be fixed (north side):






Here's the shiny new south wall:





Brewing equipment finally organized and in one place! Camping gear within arm's reach! Wonderfulness!

This post has turned into a novel. I'll continue with the basement part later. Enjoy the digital paint fumes as much as I have in real life. Oh & enjoy the jungle garden boxes...I literally can't see into the center of the tomato patch:

How does your garden grow

With lettuce & squash hardly in a row

Sunshine in the city

This weekend was full of sun. Saturday morning we volunteered for National Trails Day at Hidden Valley Park in Draper and worked on a brand new trail. The rest of the weekend was spent in the sunshine in our own backyard.

I gave the garden a spa treatment by putting in stepping paths and adding extra black soil from our raised beds.







Thanks Janice for the stone arrangements and thanks Dad for the sheet metal and thank you Jim for the saws all.

Mark has been a patient man while redesigning the valve system this weekend. But with Jim's help, now all of our irrigation is ready to go!

White out

The good white:







The bad white:



C'mon veggies, you can make it!

Huffing things in cans on ladders

It's been a smelly weekend so far. I stained the valence boxes above the living room windows and I've touched up a lot of walls with paint.




More painting tomorrow and hopefully mantel pictures to follow.

Veggies Galore

Here's the backyard garden (view from the deck):




This is the first year we've had paths in the garden making 6 sections. Back here we have:
58 heads of lettuce
2 onion
2 leek
8 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, yielding about 15 plants
6 bell peppers, all different colors
1 jalepeno
1 serrano
1 mucho nacho pepper
5 blackberry bushes
4 head of garlic
1 Rosemary bush
4 borage plants

Here's a close up of one plot.


I planted the blackberries in buckets and buried them so they don't take over the garden or the neighbors yard.

This weekend Mark put a gate in the fence so we could get to the front & backyard gardens conveniently.



And it is indeed convenient.

Remember the front raised beds?



There's the currant bush! The first bed has 3 tomato plants, 2 tomatillos, a row of basil, a row of cilantro, a row of fennel, 1 chive, 1 sage, and 1 parsley.

The second box has all seeds so it doesn't look very nifty yet: 2 zucchini, 2 crookneck squash, 2 acorn squash, 5 borage, and 4 echinacea.

Here's to hoping the weekend cold spell doesn't kill anything!

Garden boxes finished

I planted three kinds of squash in one box last night. Waiting for a little more sunshine to drop the herbs in. You can't see it very well but we got the currant bush down as well.












The scraggly bush in the last picture is the currant.