Fence rebuild

Yesterday the Leaning Fence of Pisa gave up the ghost and collapsed entirely.


Very distressing! It's not like I wander around naked, and the neighbor's house doesn't even have windows on that side, but I like having a fence there, dammit. I priced out various configurations of new fence then headed to Lowe's today and bought replacement materials.

$194 got me a pile of boards and fasteners.


Check out these clever things! (and yes, my house really is bright blue-y aqua.)


They (theoretically) obviate the need to dig a 2' deep post hole. You dig a relatively shallow and wide hole, then bury the bottom half in concrete. The 4x4 post bolts in to the top half. I oriented the gizmos so that the top flanges face the wind - it should help this thing work better if it's going to work at all.


My neighbor, on the lee of the fence, has WAY more land than I do. Unfair! The grooves in the concrete should hopefully channel rain/snow water away from the posts and help them last longer.

I'll water the ground around the brackets and leave them alone for at least three days. Hopefully the next post on the fence will be in the middle of next week and it'll show a finished fence - it's only about 20' to replace, so it won't take long.

Fabulous garden

We always had a garden when I was a kid, and ever since I moved out I've wanted to have one again. This is my first chance! Not in fertile Mississippi soil, with seasons I instinctively understand and plenty of rain. Nope. Out here in Nevada, in a sandpit backyard, with the wild-west weather and the short growing season.

I'm actually not complaining about the sand. My friend four blocks downhill has 12" of silt on a caliche base - she'll have deep sucking mudpuddles til May. At least I've got well-drained sand, enriched with a little humus, and I do own a very large hair and manure producing machine. Sand + compost = great dirt!



I started seriously trying to figure out how to garden when we bought the house last August. I've been googling off and on ever since then, trying to figure out when you plant stuff here. Last night, I finally found it! If you are trying to garden in the Reno / Tahoe area of Nevada, here's the pdf you've been looking for: UNR's "Getting Started with a Vegetable Garden." (Theoretically) reliable frost-free dates! Growing season! When to plant what stuff!!

I was so excited to find that - and realize that I wasn't actually too late - that I ran out and built my first raised bed. Well, I might not have been quite so excited if it wasn't such a lovely day - it got into the 60s, my lovely sand has dried out, and it's light til almost 6 now.

Behold!


I've spent six months dithering about what to make the walls of the beds out of. I've priced out fir, redwood, railroad ties, and cinderblocks. I've agonized over sizing and height. And today I just went and raided the woodpile behind the barn and knocked together the biggest thing I could build.

They're 2x6" cedar boards that spent who knows how many years behind the barn. They used to be a deck - there's some paint and stain still visible on them, and the ends of the boards have nail holes. But they haven't quite given their all yet, and I think they should gracefully retire as garden beds. I screwed them to some 3x4" pallet boards that were also in the pile, and I leveled the bed. It's built into a slight slope. I cut the pallet boards with legs that extend about 6 more inches into the ground.

I wanted beds that were 3-4' wide, and the most efficient use of my boards turned out to be 43". I kind of wish I could've built real raised beds, maybe 2' off the ground, but this will do. I've got enough 2x6's to make one more bed, then I've got enough 3"x4" pallet boards to make one even shorter bed. I've also got a bunch of 1x12" shelving boards, but I don't know how long a 3/4" thick board will last. And I think three beds will be enough for my first year gardening. :)

Questions!
Is there an efficient way to mix compost with existing sand? Should I shovel out all the sand and then layer compost-sand-compost-sand and fork it all together, or is there a better way?

Has anybody tried that Square Foot Gardening thing? It seems really well suited to my situation - tiny beds, lots of soil amendment, irrigation is essential.

What should I plant? I know I want to put in a permanent herb garden - that's one reason I want three beds. Of course I will try tomatoes, but they're hard to grow out here. I must grow carrots to feed to the horse that provides the manure. I'm not going to try corn - not enough space, and I think the wind would demolish it. Definitely bush beans. Definitely squash and zucchini. Definitely radishes and baby lettuce. Maybe turnips. Maybe broccoli and cabbage, but I know they're all brassicas and I have to rotate them carefully.

If I manage to grow tomatoes, and the devil tomatoworms find me, I am going to make my friend come kill them. Tomato worms give me the heebie jeebies like nothing else. Maybe I will catch a chicken and make the chicken eat the worm.

Sometimes I just patch things

I try to only talk about the beautiful yet affordable projects I undertake, because it's much nicer to pretend that any house issue can be fixed with a coat of paint and some clever trim. But some problems are larger, and of course things break with no regard to timing.

We've got a slimy cesspool broken above-ground swimming pool in the backyard. A couple days after we closed on the house, we plugged the filter unit in and the magic blue smoke came out and the filter was no more. We decided not to replace the filter - above-ground pools have a finite life and don't really add to the value of the house. And we're on a well. In the desert. It's kinda dumb.

Anyway, everything else was breaking or malfunctioning and I didn't get the damn thing totally drained before winter, so now it really is a slimy cesspool. Homeowners' insurance requires that our attractive nuisance swimming pool be fenced off with locked gates. We scrambled to get the backyard technically "fenced" - please enjoy this shot of a chain link fence ziptied to the existing fence to cover a random hole.


Classy, I know. Anyway. The double gates by the garage broke in the last windstorm. So did about 18' of the fence on the woodpile side of the house. The whole privacy fence is pretty precarious, and the gate latch board broke. The fence on the woodpile side had a dry-rotted post that gave up the ghost in a blizzard a couple weeks back - I watched it slowly creak sideways in the wind. Poor fence!

I measured for the woodpile fence, then went around and checked the gates. I only needed one 1-by plank to fix the gate, so I checked the barn and lucked out!

Here's the repaired re-locked gate. You can see that I didn't even bother to rehang the handle - it's got a latch on the other side and a lock on the latch and that's good enough.


Yes, the replacement board is too short. It gaps at the top and bottom. It's hard to care, when the tops of the two gates lean against each other because of this:


The board and backing post are split and there's like one carriage bolt holding the top hinge on. It's really hard to care about this - there is NO easy fix. All the boards are incredibly dried out and split from the weather, we don't use the gate, and we only need the fence to be there to keep the insurance company from freaking out and dropping us. As soon as I finish draining the pool I can trash the liner, recycle the aluminum, and get it off our insurance.

We're tossing around a bunch of ideas for what to do with the space when the pool is gone. It'll be some kind of outdoor lounging and/or cooking area - maybe a chiminea, maybe just the grill and some chairs?

Until then, well, it's locked away from suicidal neighborhood children.

From zero to hero

Here's the awful bathroom when we moved in:


Busy floral wallpaper. Ceiling and door trim painted pink to match the wallpaper. Wooden shelves, one towel rack, very dark vanity and door. The tub and sink are inoffensive beige cultured marble, and the floor has the original yellow linoleum.

(You can also see the awful hot pink and white crackle finish in the bedroom - I got that fixed before we even moved in.)

I hated the bathroom, but set it as a pretty low priority. When I painted the front room, I ended up with almost a gallon of yellow paint left over, and I started thinking about painting the bathroom yellow. I decided a tiny bright yellow room would actually look pretty good with our existing bathroom furnishings.

I should be finishing the hall, because it is a sign of good moral character to promptly finish what you start, plus it gets depressing when you demolish too many rooms in a house at once. But you know what? With G in SF, there's no responsible adult here to tell me what to do! Hahahahah! Last week I started peeling wallpaper.

I got all the wallpaper off and scrubbed the glue off of the walls without damaging them too badly. One of the seams near the shower had peeled, and those cretins had glued it back down with Elmer's glue. I carefully cut the Elmer's off the wall - took a little of the sheetrock paper with it - then figured out how to match the texture. I sanded and primed all of the wooden fixtures and the walls, then painted the walls yellow and all the wooden trim white. Painting the wooden shelves took for-freakin-ever, but I didn't want to buy more and I thought they'd break up the yellow and look cute white.

Today I got everything put back together.

Here's the little white shelves and our awesome shower curtain:


White vanity, 33-year-old lino:


Towel racks:


I have the wooden plugs that cover the screw holes, but I think I'm just going to caulk the holes and touch up the paint there. The little wooden plugs are gonna be a horrible PITA to paint, and I'm ok with just covering the holes.

I also need to finish the door. I yanked a bunch of doors off their hinges and leaned them against various walls and they're half-primed. I am really tired of not having any doors anywhere, so maybe I'll work on doors tomorrow. They're very hurry-up-and-wait tedious.

Ok, is there anything you'd like to hear more about from the bathroom? I can go into my usual great amounts of detail about how I peeled the wallpaper and prepped the walls, matched the texture of the sheetrock, or painted the walls and/or the trim.

I am really awful about shopping for accessories. I feel like I should acquire some complementary knickknack things for those shelves but I have no idea what. I am going to look for a chocolate-brown hand towel on Amazon, though.

Dithering

Obviously, I've slowed down on the hall project. I keep dithering about what piece to tackle next - I'm trying to maximize my time and use of consumable materials and I'm wasting more time that I'd potentially save. I thought I'd write up a rough post about where I can go next, so you can see my thought process.

The hall floor needs an annoying bit of detail work. I need to finish the linen closet, rip some boards for the back of the coat closet, and cut tiny little nubs of hardwood and glue them in place under the door trim. (Once I get around to it, I'll take pics, so this will eventually make sense.) This requires getting in the garage.

(Getting in the garage: I have to figure out what's wrong with the light in the garage - is it too cold, is the ballast shot, or does it just need new bulbs? It's too cold to just leave the garage door open - my well pressure tank lives in the garage, and I don't want to freeze my pipes yet again.)

The baseboard and quarter round need to go up. The quarter round needs priming, but I can do that before or after I nail it up. Cutting the trim requires getting in the garage. Priming the QR is unbelievably tedious with a brush, but it'd be a piece of cake if I had a roller already handy.

Many doors need priming, then painting. I'll roll them with primer, then brush it out to get the nice brush marks. I just need a place to work on them - I was thinking of doing them in the garage in our balmy spring weather, but balmy spring has deserted us and roaring winter is back. Too cold. I can clean out one of the spare bedrooms. If I do the doors before the trim, I can prime that QR at that point. I will run out of primer and trim paint soon, so I need paint.

I need to paint the hall walls again - I only put one coat on them before, and all the construction has left lots of smudges. I don't have enough paint though. Need more paint.

I finally took down the dysfunctional smoke detector in the hall - but it's hard-wired. I could cap it or just replace it with another AC smoke detector. Ordered one from Amazon yesterday.

I have decided I deserve better caulk so I'm going to get 2 tubes of White Lightning.

I think I have four options: floor, walls, trim, doors. What I should do is finish the floor, then trim, then get paint and do the walls, doors, and finish trim painting. But I'm about to get snowed in - not so I can't get out, but to the point where it would be prudent to not go out unless I must. So I think I'll figure out the garage light, then go buy paint and caulk, then come home and make the best of it.



edit: I'm not going anywhere, because the damn truck is dead. Let's see what heroic measures the warranty covers this time...

Don't buy DAP caulk!

It's like I live to torpedo any chance I may ever have of becoming a highly paid sellout blogger. I cuss a lot and post intermittently and rant against products I hate.

I'm caulking the door trim and I was overwhelmed by the irresistible urge to come tell you how awful DAP caulk is. You probably don't even realize it's awful because it's everywhere and it's often the only choice, but there are much better caulk products out there. I checked a bunch of places in Reno and got frustrated and bought like 5 tubes of DAP, then I found White Lightning at the Lowe's on Kietzke.

White Lightning makes a lot of good products. The Window and Door is probably good, the 3006 is good, and the Painter's Preferred is good. Sherwin Williams in Memphis had something else that was really good - I can't remember what it was called. SW's in Reno do not. Just fucking DAP.

Good caulk in a good caulk gun will not fall out of the crack you're caulking. It will not keep oozing out of the gun when you set it down. It's stiffer and not as slimy and it's much much easier to work with. Find better caulk and your life will be so much easier. I can't tell you how tempted I am to throw the last tube and a half away and go buy some damn White Lightning.

Nine doors

This stupid hallway. It has nine doorways and eight doors. (There's no door to the laundry room - previous owners took it down and I'm not missing it.) Anyway, that means nine doorways to trim, nine doorways to caulk and fill, nine doorways to cut in around, nine doorways to paint, and eight doors to paint. I got the door trim up today. I should take pics so you can see how crappy it looks before I putty and caulk it. I used all the MDF trim and most of the oak trim - had to piece two doorways together, but I think they'll work.