Depave Chain Gang

May 2012

The weekend of our Depave, Josh and I took the Friday before off and worked to pre-cut the concrete, prepare the house and ready our yards for the work.  Everyone showed up on a chilly Saturday and we spent the first part of the morning explaining how and why we depave.  We were the experts, we then gave everyone a trial on the concrete saw.  It was about this time that we started realizing the concrete was thicker then we thought.

We had assumed for about 2-3 inches thick, which is standard for non-structural walkways and driveways.  It turned out our concrete had not been poured on an even surface.  They poured the concrete unevenly onto rock. In some areas it was 6 inches thick.  It was rough.  We had to rent a jack hammer and our volunteers diligently worked with pry bars, jack hammers, and sledge hammers to remove the concrete. In many ways it looked less like a workshop and more like a chain gang.  We had 30 people working their butts off and we were making progress at a back breaking snail's pace.

The good news, everyone was amazing! Hard working and determined to at least get our driveway strip completed before the end of the day.  When they left we were had only removed about 250 sqft of the 1500 sqft we had planned.  But the bigger issue was that the slabs of concrete did not come out as slabs.  Since we used the jack hammer and sledgehammers, we had made rubble.  Josh and I had originally planned to use the nicely cut concrete slabs as stepping stones, we had no use for the rubble.  So in the short term we dumped all the concrete on our patio and ordered up a dumpster for us to recycle it.  Here is a great picture of our rubble pile at night from the kitchen.  We joked our back yard now had a 'derelict" look to it, a la Zoolander. Nothing like turning your backyard into a third world war zone to really spruce up your curb appeal.

On Sunday, we decided to divide and conquer.  Josh continued to jack hammer the strip and areas along our patio, while my neighbor Mary and I came out and dug out the drive way strip.  We added new soil, planted our ground cover and installed a pea gravel top.  I felt a little better by the end of the day. But we had only done about 1/8th of the work we had hoped to achieve.  This was the first real 'what were we thinking' project and we knew we had about 4 weekends worth of work to go. Gulp.

Raising a Garden Day 1

April 2010

We took another month off in house land, our near death event of the almost falling chandelier made us decide to hold off.  We also were trying to save some much needed money for our exterior remodel which we wanted to take on in the spring.  So, I took the time to lust over some seed catalogs and make big plans to have a large organic garden come summer. 

Since our backyard doesn't get much sunlight the most logical place to put our garden was in our front yard.  While this may seem to weird to people not from Portlandia, this is actually pretty common in our town.  In order to make it appear more pleasing we decided to building some raised beds.  This would help for multiple reasons.  First, we have a small hill on the corner of our yard that already needed a retaining wall.  Second, prior to moving in our sewer line was replaced and they had destroyed all the grass and plantings in this area.  Last, I am lazy and do not like to bend.

Josh went about creating some plans for the beds, when you're an underemployed architect it's amazing the time and energy your willing to commit to plans and elevations of small household projects.  But, it was good for us to brush off the dust on our autocad and make it happen.  After we both felt they looked good and provided enough space for our garden, we went ahead and ordered the wood from a friend.  These were beautiful pieces of cedar, since it was rough cut they were true dimensions and weighed about 100 lbs each.  He delivered them on a rainy day and filled our garage to the brim.

Now all we needed was a few days of no rain to get start....

Yard Redemption

October 2010

 

After our planting trip, Josh and I stepped it up and pulled some long days to turn up the soil and get the plants in the ground.  We laid it all out and spent an entire day planting, mulching and laying the stones.  By 6:00 pm it was getting dark and we called it a night.  Step one was complete and we had unearthed our house from behind the rhodies.  We felt satisfied to go into the holiday season with a fresh look outside.

 

Also, on a similiar landscaping note we added two 'street trees,' these reside in our planting strip between the sidewalk and the road.  We are the only house on the entire block without street trees and while I enjoy the sunlight, it also makes us look a little bare. 

In the Spring, Josh and I purchased a dwarf Bing Cherry tree, in the Fall, we added a hybrid Cherry tree, which had four separate cherries species grafted onto one trunk.  I am very excited for the day our little saplings are beautiful trees, and of course for all those delicious cherries. My neighbor told me there is a Chinese proverb about trees... "when is the best time to plant a tree?  20 years ago.  What is the next best time to plant a tree? Right now."