Look What I Found in the Brush-and-Bulky Piles!

It seems the economic meltdown hasn’t stopped people from discarding valuable items.  I was on the prowl recently for good bagged composting leaves and ended up picking up all this stuff people put out for bulky garbage collection:

 

Six 75-foot long soaker hoses.  These were all in one giant pile in front of a house in the next block.  I tested a couple out and it appears there is nothing wrong with them.  Just a couple weeks ago I bought a pair of these at Sam’s Club.  Unfortunate timing, but I will eventually find a good spot for all of them.  At Home Depot yesterday I priced this long variety at around $14 for each one!  What luck!!

 

A 10-foot section of steel edging.  I continually buy this product at Lowe’s as I work my way around the front landscape beds.  Each 10-foot section is $10, so this acquisition will save me enough to ….. I dunno, buy some junk on craigslist?!?!  🙂  It appears to be in good shape, so who knows why someone got rid of it.

 

Several large, tubby plant containers.  These were out in front of a house someone is flipping.  It appears they held some Indian hawthorn from a nursery, based on the tags.  I like that they are short for their overall size.  I stuck them in a row out behind the vegetable garden where they will eventually grow something useful or beautiful.

 

 

And the grand prize …… a vintage Queen Anne solid wood coffee table by Bassett furniture.  Odd, right?  Seriously this was next to a bunch of grass clippings and lawn garbage.  It is solid wood and in pretty decent shape with just one chip on the top.  It was next to a box from West Elm, no doubt a cheap replacement that will last a fraction as long.  I don’t really need this table, but it is growing on me.  I may paint it, I may offload it on craigslist, I just couldn’t let it go to the dump.

 

 

I also got a ton of leaves, which has become my new favorite pastime.  I’ll detail that in a later post.  Happy trolling!!

Making More Free Thyme

Woolly Thyme, originally uploaded by patrick_standish.

I love that garden magazine look of wooly thyme creeping between stones. I have a flagstone edge along my front flower bed, and I would love it if I could get thyme growing between all the nooks and crannies and spilling over onto the rocks.

It would cost a fortune to buy the dozens of little thyme plants at the nursery, so this spring I put a couple small thyme plants I received at the spring plant swap into a container out back. Here is what they spread into over the summer:

This morning I cut 5 inch patches out of the planter and started inserting them along the rock edge. I used a knife to get a clean cut, and so far I’m surprised how far the patch is going. I think it will look fabulous once it gets going in its new home! If only it didn’t take all summer to get this accomplished.

Improving the Square Foot Garden

“Homely Homer” Tomatoes, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

My fall tomatoes are going strong and starting to ripen. They are doing considerably better than my summer ones did. I imagine it’s because I chose better varieties, and because it’s easier to keep them watered when it’s slightly cooler outside.

I also decided to change up the trellis for the fall garden. This old setup with the rigid panel made it difficult to reach through to the middle of the garden. It also didn’t seem very feng shui.

I needed something more flexible, that would allow tieing up tomatoes and beans in other parts of the box. To achieve this I decided to turn the cattle panel into a roof instead of a wall. Using a few more piece of conduit and zip ties, this is what I came up with:

So far it seems to be a much more workable system. Here is the mound of pole beans climbing up the string:

And the string on the trellis:

The overall garden:

Installing New Exterior Shutters

Installing Shutters, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

This week as economic turmoil and political gamesmanship ruled the news I felt like focusing my attention more intently on the house. I tackled a project that’s been sitting undone for awhile: new exterior shutters.

Here’s before, with yucky, crumbling old white plastic shutters:

Here’s the midway point, where we existed for a few months while the shutters were being fabricated:

And today, after I painted and installed the new ones:

These are custom vinyl shutters from ArchitecturalDepot.com that cost around $200 for two pair. I would have loved wood or composite ones, but they cost considerably more ($1,000+) and weren’t worth it to me as I think the end result is pretty good. Vinyl shutters from a hardware store cost even less than what I paid, but sizes are limited, and if you special order unusual sizes they will actually run more than what I paid online.

I also had a rather unusual problem of fitting these to the masonry that made it easier to work with vinyl. Let me explain.  I feel like a lot of the cheap shutters I see are misproportioned. They are usually way too narrow to be even close to realistic. Given that a shutter’s original use was to cover the window, I feel like visually they look better and less like they came from Home Depot if they are closer to half the width of the window. The top, or soldier, row of masonry on my house has every fourth or fifth brick angling out at the bottom. That made it a challenge to fit these wider shutters.

I used metal snips and my Dremel with a coarse drum sander attachment to carve away enough of the back of the shutter for them to fit. Tedious, but worth the end result.

Another house in my neighborhood apparently has the same issue. The installer just moved the shutters down. Does this look goofy to anyone else?

Mine are paneled style shutters that I ordered with a primed finish. Paneled are supposed to be more formal than louvered or the trendy board-and-batten shutters that seem like they are everywhere. I wasn’t going for formal, but I figured that these would be easy to paint and also match my paneled wood front entry door. I used the same oil-based high gloss exterior house trim paint on them that I used for the posts. Benjamin Moore “briarwood,” specifically.

They are attached using plastic anchors called shutterloks. It’s important to get the mortar holes right the first time because the shutterloks will not come out without a ton of effort once they are hammered. I drilled the shutter holes first and then marked using a small thin paintbrush the exact drilling spot onto the mortar. I painted the anchors to match the shutters. 

Would love to hear your thoughts on shutters!

Refinishing More Woods Floors, Without Sanding

Finished Hallway Floor, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

 

In my blog dashboard it’s so interesting to look at the search words that lead people here. Wood floor refinishing without sanding, or some combo of those terms, is always near the top.

Here’s the before image of that photo above:

We recently finished redoing the remaining 50-year-old red oak floors in our house. Before we moved in all that space was covered with old carpet.

This last project included the den, hallway and a couple bedrooms with various closets. We refinished the rest earlier in three phases over the course of about a year. One room we did ourselves, the other two we hired professional help. All three sections received a different treatment or finish, and they all now look surprisingly the same.

Here are the main takeaways from all this:

• For goodness sake if you’re going to refinish your floor do it before you move in. I learned this the hard way. Whatever inconvenience or rent you might have to endure on the front end will make up for headaches that come from moving too much stuff, dusting things, waiting for the floor to dry, etc.
• Floor professionals, especially wood refinishers, have a vested interest in telling you that you need the entire finish sanded off, new quarter round applied, and so on. In many cases glue and other issues can be scraped or screened off. These remedies worked for me.
• Old varnish finishes can be recoated with modern polyurethane or wax, as long as the old finish is thoroughly cleaned and prepared. When we redid the office floor, we applied wax which looks pretty decent (although it attracts dust).
• The den, hallway and bedrooms are poly over old varnish that was screened first. The key there is to find a floor guy who won’t short you on the number of coats of sealant the floor will need.  Honestly I thought about asking the guy back to apply one last coat to the bedrooms, but the rug covers so much it didn’t seem worth it.  Old floors suck up the finish.
• The formal living and dining area floor is a varnish/resin finish that was applied over the old varnish. It looks best out of all the areas, probably because that floor was walked on least, and because varnish is nice looking.
• The more you know about your floor, the better your outcome.  Testing to figure out old treatments, and testing anything you intend to use on the floor to guage reaction ahead of time, will help create a better outcome.

What You Should Know Before Redoing Your Yard

From DallasNews.com.

I wrote a piece that ran in Friday’s Dallas Morning News about landscape design classes around Dallas.  What makes this story interesting is that I’d actually taken the three seminars/classes that I write about.  I wrote about my experience in first person.  For the cover image, similar to the one above, the editor had an artist lay out some of my sketches and printouts I’ve collected about my own yard, so it’s really weird to see that in the newspaper!  The web version shows the coffee ring my backyard sketch got from sitting on my messy desk.  How was I to know it would become famous?  😉

The three options I write about are a one-day Neil Sperry class, a 6-week night course at SMU, and one-on-one coaching at North Haven Nursery.  For most people the Sperry class is probably the best deal.  You can read the entire explanation here.

Wood Floor Project

Ruby Misses the Carpet, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Ruby’s posing quite nicely isn’t she?

She’s actually protesting here. She’s upset that we removed the stinky old wall-to-wall carpet.

Over the past couple weeks we took out the rest of the carpet from the den, hallway and bedrooms. My mom came from Amarillo to help me do things like pull out the tackstrip. It was an enormous amount of work and I couldn’t have done it without her.

We hired Ken from Heaven’s Scent Flooring to buff and screen the floors, which I’ll detail in a future post. In the meantime I had to post this photo of my puppy and the new-to-me rug that Michael and I picked up at a recent estate sale.

Saving Pesto

Excess Basil, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

To make way for more fall seedlings I pulled out a couple basil plants that had become quite overgrown in my raised garden. There was so much of it that it took a good hour or so to pick off all these leaves from a single plant.

A good way to store basil is by making pesto and then freezing it. If you freeze the sauce in an ice cube tray and then repackage the cubes, it makes for easy retrieval and use later on.

My pesto recipe is….

1-2 garlic cloves
2 cups basil
2 oz. parmesan cheese
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt to taste, at least a couple teaspoons

Whirred up in the food processor, this is tough to beat. I find it it difficult to mess this up, especially if you adjust the flavors at the end for acidity and salt. If you find yourself without enough basil, throw in some spinach to extend the amount of sauce the recipe produces.

Veggie Garden Focus: Asian Delights

Annie Chapman’s backyard garden, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

The fourth in my series of stories on Dallas area vegetable gardens runs in today’s issue of The Dallas Morning News. It’s about Annie Chapman, a Thai immigrant who learned how to garden from her parents.

She has made her entire large backyard into a big vegetable and flower garden. Of all the people I visited, she devotes the most space to growing vegetables. She is so nice, and whenever I talk with her she wants me to come back out to her place to talk gardening!

I love the style of this place. She’s got crazy statues like this one with the tomatoes, raised beds from concrete blocks, compost in an old smoker. It’s an excellent display of resourcefulness!

The main takeaways for improving a garden based on her advice:

• Add organic matter all the time. In the fall when neighbors bag their leaves and set them out for trash pickup, confiscate them and spread over your beds so they can decompose over the winter.
• Plant unusual items. She has lemongrass, jujubes, persimmons, long beans, Thai lettuce, in addition to all the standard stuff. If anything underperforms she has a backup.

I am working on fall seedlings right now. Does anyone around here have theirs in the ground yet?

Walking Dog Equals Free Stuff

Metal Baker’s Rack, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Since we adopted Ruby, Michael and I have traded off walking her each morning. Over time, that’s a lot of ground we cover, and as other dog walkers will surely attest, there are interesting things out there.

For one, people throw away amazing stuff. I thought craigslist was great, how about just the front curb? Yesterday Ruby and I came upon this metal baker’s rack sitting in the “brush & bulky” trash pickup spot. Mine now.  Very exciting, I think I may use it in the backyard to store some pots.

Our other recent coup was an enormous plastic flower pot in excellent condition. Terra cotta colored. Haven’t decided what to plant in it yet. It was sitting next to a dumpster in the neighborhood.