Rockstar

My husband moved a ton of rocks this weekend. That's not an exaggeration or a figure of speech: he literally moved 2,000+ pounds of rocks, stones, and slate into our backyard this weekend. We now have a slate patio and a meandering path in the yard. Let's jump to the good stuff, and then I'll backtrack and tell you about our process.

Here is what the yard looks like now:

 

Now for all the gritty details:

After a summer of tedious tasks like stripping paint and patching plaster, we were feeling frustrated about the lack of visual improvement to our house. For the sake of our emotional health, we decided we needed a "quick win": a project that would boost the appearance of our home and provide us with a satisfying sense of accomplishment without requiring an enormous investment of time or money. In other words, we needed a project like those featured on HGTV, where a room/house/yard is completely transformed in a mere 72 hours.

Since we bought this house, we've talked about installing two patios in the backyard. Our backyard has two sections: an upper level near the house, with walkways and a small patch of grass. Right now, this is where we keep our barbecue, saw horses, and some construction materials. It's not a particularly pretty space. We'd eventually like to have a large patio up here.

Our yard also has a much larger lower level; it's reachable either by a short flight of stairs or by walking down our gravel driveway. We also envisioned a small patio in this lower level. When we moved in, this was just an enormous patch of grass. About a year ago, my husband S created a vegetable garden with raised beds. He also created a diamond dust path from the driveway to the garden. Since then, he's slowly been planting perennials and natives to make our yard a haven for all sorts of critters.

Backyard, Fall 2015. Looking towards house.

Backyard, Fall 2015

We hadn't planned to do any major work in the yard this year, since we have so many unfinished projects. But over the summer, my husband and father-in-law installed a slate patio in the backyard of his childhood home. My inlaws had quite a bit of surplus material, and generously offered it to us. They even offered to drive the slate to our house. Our largest car is a Honda Civic, so we especially appreciated their offer to help with transportation. Suddenly, the patio project seemed like it could be our "quick win." With the donated slate already in hand, we would just need to purchase diamond dust and any other decorative rocks we wanted. The cost of the project would be relatively minimal.

Thanks to a fair amount of planning, this project came together over the course of four long, sweaty non-consecutive days.

Day 1 (Saturday):

This first day is spent mapping out the patio and prepping the ground. As I mentioned earlier, we'd eventually like to have two patios: one on the upper level near the house, and a smaller one on the lower level. We decide to start with the smaller patio, based on the amount of slate we have. S charts out a 10'x10' square between the oak tree and the dogwood. Our goal is to create a patio large enough to accommodate some outdoor furniture (either a dining set or a lounge set), without significantly decreasing the amount of grass. We also talk about creating some paths: one from the stairs to the patio, and another towards the side of the yard.

Our backyard slopes away from our house at a pretty steep grade. This is great from a drainage perspective. However, it's a challenge when you need to create a flat surface. Most of day 1 is spent creating a level space for the patio. S ends up creating a 4-6" berm and filling in the 10'x10' space with dirt to create a smooth surface.

Day 2 (the following Friday):
S has taken a vacation day to work on the patio project. I'm feeling pretty grateful: not a lot of people would be excited to spend a vacation day pushing around rocks, but he is. As I leave for the office, the local quarry delivers three yards of diamond dust. This will be used under the slate tiles and in the walkways. All the diamond dust will eventually make its way down the driveway, then back up the yard towards the patio area.  Here is a visual of the long journey that S and that diamond dust will take together, over and over again:

While I'm at work, I get a text from S. He wants to know what type of rocks should go around the edge of the patio. We agree on pond stone, as well as some larger rocks mixed in for texture and visual interest. At lunch, I go outside and snap a picture to send to S. These are the larger rocks I'd like to see interspersed with the pond stone. They are apparently called river jacks.

This picture feels like such a fashion blogger cliche...

I return to our house 11 hours later, and the yard has been transformed. More than half of the patio is complete and both paths are in progress. I'm so thrilled that I forget to take a picture.

Day 3 (Saturday):
S continues laying the slate tiles on the remaining portion of the patio. I'm now able to witness how labor intensive this process is. Much of the day involves tamping the diamond dust before installing the slate to ensure the surface is as level as possible. Several times, I catch S lying face down on the ground, trying to get a good read on the level (or perhaps he is taking a much-needed break...I can't be quite sure). He also continues filling in the pathways with diamond dust, and tamping those as well.

I have a dentist appointment first thing in the morning, so I'm out of the house for three hours. My dentist is 40 miles away, and this is one of those times when I'm kicking myself for not finding a local dentist after we moved here. Apparently, I'm too lazy to research a new dentist, but not too lazy to drive an hour for a dental cleaning. It figures.

When I'm back home, S is putting pond stone and river jacks (those larger ones I requested) around the edges of the patio. Based on our bank account activity, I now know that S went to Lowe's six times on Saturday. He also went to the garden center three times. We needed a ton of rocks for this project, and you can only load so much into a small car. Luckily, we live close to both stores. But now there are even more rocks that need to be moved from the driveway to the yard. I help by moving 50 lbs of pond stone. S suggests that I leave this part to him; apparently I am lifting with my back and it concerns him.

Here is the part where I totally pull my weight: I leave for another three hours for a riding lesson. If you are thinking that I sound like a prissy princess, I can't say I blame you. La-di-da. My husband is moving rocks to build a patio. All by himself. I'll just go off and ride some horses. Isn't this a relaxing weekend?

For the sake of clarity, I should explain that the riding lessons are an occasional thing. This is only the third time I've ever ridden, and I'm very much a beginner. I received a package of lessons as a gift from S (as if you needed any more evidence that he's a wonderful husband). The lessons were not cheap, so I want to be sure I use all my lessons before they expire at the end of October. I'd love to continue riding in the future, but I'm not sure whether that will be possible. It's quite a commitment, both of time and money. By the way, if you'd like to see a picture of me riding, feel free to check out my Instagram account.

On my way home from the stables, I stop at an orchard to pick up S's favorite variety of apples, as well as some hard cider and some cider donuts. If there is ever a day when he should feel free to indulge in comfort food, it's today. Back at the house, I trim back some of the dying plants and rake the leaves from the front yard. Then I head inside to straighten up the kitchen and start dinner. Tonight, we're having margherita pizza (for homemade dough, I like this recipe from Smitten Kitchen). If I'm not helping with the manual labor, the least I can do is to prep something tasty and filling for us to eat. 

At the end of day 3, the yard looks like this:

Day 4 (Sunday): 
A pallet of fieldstone arrives from the garden center. Our neighbors must think we're planning to build a wall. My father-in-law also stops by. He and S have plans for a few hours in the morning. While they are gone, I paint window sashes in our basement workshop and do some laundry. When S returns, he moves the fieldstone, arranging it along the edges of the patio and paths. He also uses it to create a boundary between our grass and the mulched flower beds. This, along with more tamping, takes most of the day. I run errands and make another filling dinner: kale caeser salad and roasted butternut squash soup with bacon.

 

We have a few odds and ends to finish up before we'll call this project complete. Next spring, we will add some furniture to the patio so that it is fully functional (the adirondack is just there temporarily to show scale). But this project has definitely satisfied our need for a "quick win." Feel free to tell my husband he's a rockstar. I'm probably biased, but I tend to agree. 

 

 

Scrap Paper

Occasionally I feel like writing about topics that are only tangentially related to restoring our home. Ideas that have been swirling around, half-formed, waiting to be shared. I'm not sure how often I'll write these mishmosh posts, but each time I do, they'll be titled "Scrap Paper."

By the way, there is an interesting article on the usage of "scrap paper" vs "scratch paper." I was raised primarily in California, and "scratch paper" is the term I heard most often on the West Coast, as this article suggests. But I currently have approximately five dozen bug bites, so I do not want to think about the word "scratch" more than absolutely necessary.

Bitten
The Papered House is the first home that my husband and I have owned. It's also the first time we've had a yard of our own. It turns out that I like gardening more than I thought I would. If you give me an empty five-gallon bucket and a few spare hours, I'll spend the entire afternoon weeding. Even the unpleasant parts, like the dirty fingernails and achy back, don't really bother me. Unfortunately, I'm a mosquito magnet. I've tried multiple methods of insect repellent, but none of them seem to work very well. I counted my mosquito bites last night and stopped counting when I got to 65. I know the chances of contracting West Nile Virus from a mosquito are quite small. But surely, your chances must increase when you have been bitten >65 times?

I have a theory that wearing a full neoprene ensemble, like a wetsuit, would offer excellent protection from these pint-sized airborne vampires. But if I traipse around in a wetsuit in our backyard, I'm sure the neighbors would worry about my well-being.


Not Coloring Books, but Color Books
About two weeks ago, I was listening to the radio and heard about a study claiming that coloring is therapeutic for adults. I don't doubt that artistic endeavors are beneficial to our mental and emotional well-being. But I filed that information into my brain's compartment for "Things That Would Be Good for Me But Are Unlikely to Happen." It's the same place where I file advice like "Drink eight glasses of water each day" or "Don't eat anything for four hours before your bedtime." How am I supposed to enjoy a glass of red wine or a piece of dark chocolate at 10 pm if I follow such a regimented schedule, drinking all that water and eschewing all those late-night sweets?

But that coloring study must have caught on quickly, because I have noticed that Coloring for Adults has become a thing in my daily existence. To wit: I attend classes at a local fitness studio that focuses a lot on mind/body connectivity. Sometimes, the classes are a little New Age-y for my taste. The instructors say things like, "As you move through tree pose, push your arms out to the side and imagine that you are pushing away something that is holding you back." We are meant to imagine things like anxiety, or stress, or fear. But my mind is relentlessly literal, and so I tend to envision physical things like our pain-in-the-butt chimney. Our chimney has been quite difficult to repair, and we are delaying several other decisions about the house until we know what's happening with the chimney. But when you are standing on one leg with your eyes closed and arms out to the side? It is awfully hard to maintain your balance while envisioning yourself pushing away some brick structure. I readily admit that I am not good at mindfulness. But! The instructors are friendly and there is a wide variety of class offerings. I am trying to be more open to new experiences. Embrace uncertainty. Relinquish control. That kind of thing.

Anyway, after one of the classes, the instructor handed each student a sheet of paper with a medallion-type thing printed on it. We were told about therapeutic Coloring for Adults and asked to color the medallions at home. Sometime in August, all the colored medallions will be hung in the studio.

I don't think I scoffed or rolled my eyes. But I might have raised my eyebrows slightly. This sounded very much like a third-grade assignment. Like I said, I'm still working on that "open to new experiences" thing.

However, just yesterday, I was at Barnes and Noble. At the entrance to the store and by the register, they had entire displays geared towards Coloring for Adults. Perhaps two dozen coloring books for the young-at-heart. So, Coloring for Adults is officially a trend. I may give it a try after all, if I can remember where I put the crayons.

In the meantime, I've been perusing more Victorian writings about paint color usage. In 1883, architect William Comstock published a book called Modern House Painting: Containing Twenty Colored Lithographic Plates. It was republished under a different title by Dover in the recent past, but it can be hard to find. I purchased a used copy online and it arrived this week.

Comstock includes brief chapters on color theory and paint application, but the real appeal of this book is the section of full-color plates illustrating recommended color schemes. The plates show gorgeous, deep, rich earth tones meant to resemble natural surroundings. When bright whites and light colors are used on exteriors, Comstock finds that "the result has been that violence has been done to nature by glaring effects and contrasts that are hideous." He encourages readers to experiment with more expressive colors than had been used in earlier architectural periods, during which "the old puritanical hatred of color...found its natural outcome in white houses with green blinds." A puritanical hatred of color. Isn't that a memorable turn of phrase? Those Victorians had a way with words.

Ironically, the exterior of our house is currently painted a shade of white so bright that it is named "Incandescent." I would bet every penny to my name that Comstock would find our house color glaring and offensive. The previous owner repainted just before selling, so we're not planning to paint the house in the near future. Eventually, I love would to see The Papered House painted a light sage green or a warm cream.


Minor Functional Obsolescence
Speaking of memorable turns of phrase: when we purchased The Papered House, the appraiser's report said that it "suffers from minor functional obsolescence" because it only has one bathroom and the fourth bedroom is really more of a loft/sitting area. Linguistically, isn't that a bizarre phrase? I don't believe that "suffer" and "minor" ever belong in the same sentence. There is no such thing as minor suffering. There just isn't.

I hadn't been familiar with real estate lingo, but it turns out that "functional obsolescence" is a common term in the business, particularly when speaking about older homes that lack some of the modern conveniences and design features. I admit that the layout of our home can seem inconvenient in comparison to modern homes. Honestly, the floor plan works for us and we know exactly where we'll add a second bathroom when finances permit. But I found it amusing that the appraiser failed to mention something of major functional obsolescence: Our boiler from the 1950s.

The Scuffle
We ran out of printer paper recently and I urgently needed to print something. All we had left was a stack of college-ruled loose-leaf paper. Why do we even have this type of paper? We have no children and I can't remember the last time I needed to take notes at home. Perhaps I've held onto this stack of paper since grad school as some sort of strange tribute to my days as a compulsive note-scribbling student. Perhaps I thought I would use it for scrap/scratch paper. But that means that I would have packed and unpacked the loose-leaf four (4!) separate times. At least it's not wide-ruled, I suppose. That would really be embarrassing.

In a fit of desperation, I tried using the loose-leaf to print the first page of a 20- page document. The first page worked like a dream. So I printed the remaining 19 pages. Big mistake. The printer looked like it challenged the paper to some epic battle of "rock, paper, printer." Printer lost, by the way, and it didn't recover quickly.


~The Papered House, with glaring effects and hideous contrasts

When Life Gives You Lemons



I've mentioned a few times on this blog that The Papered House has a slate roof. It's beautiful and historic, and tends to be very durable. Our roof is in pretty good shape, all things considered. But every once in a while, individual slate tiles become so weathered that they chip and fall off our roof. This is most common after particularly bad ice storms; the ice thaws and slides off the roof, taking small pieces of slate with it. When the ice and slate hit the ground, there is quite a ruckus. I'll tell you, seeing pieces of your roof on the ground, a good 30 feet from where they are supposed to be, is a pretty terrible feeling. We've been checking the attic for leaks after every storm, and, so far so good. We're also planning to have a roofer perform routine annual maintenance on our roof as a preventative measure. We have a plan to keep our slate roof in good repair. But still, seeing broken pieces of roofing material on the ground is an unsettling occurrence to say the least.

Throughout the winter, I gathered those slate scraps and stacked them into a pile. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to throw them out. I kept thinking, "Suppose we could do something with all this slate. It'd be a waste to throw it out." So I collected little pieces of slate for several months. It's similar to my hoarding of "good" boxes. I will save any cardboard box that is particularly sturdy/well-proportioned/potentially useful, with a definitive proclamation that "This is a good box. We can do something with my box. We shouldn't get rid of this box." My husband doesn't like this tendency; his response is typically, "Yes. We can do something with that box. We can recycle it."

Anyway, back to these pieces of slate. I decided to give them new life as DIY garden markers. If that's not an overly-optimistic interpretation of the saying "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" I'm not sure what is.

Garden versus Groundhog (0-3)

The Papered House has met its match. On three separate occasions, we have been bested by a pudgy groundhog who skulks through our backyard. He has an insatiable appetite for leafy greens and seems to view our garden as his own personal salad bar. I've taken to calling him our nemesis. My husband has a much stronger name for him, not fit for this blog.

When we first planted the garden, we knew we would need to take some measures to keep the animals away. So we surrounded all the beds with a chicken wire fence. That worked for a few weeks, until our peas, cucumbers, and broccoli seedlings went missing. A groundhog had found a way in.

Our next step was to douse all the plants with a homemade pesticide made from habanero peppers boiled in water. This measure worked for about a month. But then our nemesis must have developed a spicy palette, because he kept munching away, this time on kale and bok choy. Seriously? He likes kale? It's as though we have a hipster groundhog who thinks he's entitled to eat all the kale because he was eating kale before it became a trendy superfood. Whatever, groundhog. I didn't really care about the kale anyway. We just grew it because, you know, it's supposed to be good for us. And also, kale chips are oddly delicious.

After the second round of vegetable thievery, we doubled down and protected each individual vegetable bed with fine black netting. The netting made it more difficult for us to weed, but we figured that would be a small price to pay for keeping the groundhog at bay. Right?

Unfortunately, this is the mess we discovered in our vegetable garden after the groundhog's most recent escapade. It's almost impossible to see in this picture, but the groundhog ate the plants through the netting. He got our lettuce, arugula, and beets. He also got the second set of broccoli seedlings, which we planted recently to replace the ones he ate. From what we can tell, he sat on the netting until the vegetable leaves poked through the holes in the netting, and ate to his heart's content.

He's one determined bugger. I have to admit that I'm sort of amused by his tenacity and resourcefulness. On the other hand, it's hard not to feel deflated after devoting so much thought and time into a project that isn't going to flourish (at least, not this year). My husband carefully picked out the vegetable varieties from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, even going so far as to select the Calabrese broccoli variety because it dates to the 1800s (apparently it's not sufficient to paint our rooms historically appropriate colors. We are also trying to grow the very same type of broccoli that previous owners might have. If you're rolling your eyes right now, I don't blame you. We're obsessive, I know.) Anyway, we planted some of these crops back in the winter, setting up fluorescent light bulbs and heating pads in our basement so that we could grow the seedlings when the ground was still covered in ice and snow. The seedlings grew really well in the basement, and we gradually hardened them outside, then transplanted them when the weather was warm enough. We were really looking forward to enjoying the fruits of our labor.

I hope our nemesis enjoyed that organic heirloom broccoli.