I get asked all the time how we removed our grass and I kept meaning to write it down.
As you probably know, I’m pretty anti-lawn. We have a small yard, so having grass was a big burden to keep up. There are some grasses that are low-impact on the environment (less watering and you use natural fertilizers) and if you’re diligent and don’t live in a rain forest you can manage the weeds without chemicals.
Read MoreThe real estate photos for this house, make everything, as it was, look sharp and glowing. The photos can’t make these cabinets look modern, even if they don’t look horrible. The uppers between the kitchen and dining room were so strange to me. Kyle did not agree that these were hideous, but in the end he allowed me to rip them out. I was dying to do a project and I gave him the option one Saturday to either replace our bedroom ceiling fan or tear out this cabinet (projects I thought would take no more than 2 hours). Turns out I was wrong. Big surprise, right?
Read MoreWe have lived in our house for exactly ONE YEAR. Instead of worrying about what projects are on my to-do list, today is for looking back at all we’ve accomplished in the last year.
Read MoreHome automation technology is getting more and more popular, and I’m super giddy about it. I’m not a big gadget person, although my dad totally is. I remember him getting a digital watch in the early ‘90s and putting his entire address book in it. It had that tiny keyboard on it. No matter where we were, we could look up an address and send a letter to my aunt in California or find a phone number and call one of his colleagues from work. Now, all of that information is in our phones along with the power to manage lighting, door locks, security, refrigerators, grocery lists and even irrigation. We have been adding automation to our home little by little over the last few years and I’m going to give you the rundown on what we have, why we have it, what I want to get more of and what I would have done differently.
Read MoreEvery warm sunny day of summer I think to myself, “please never end, ever.” And then it starts to feel like fall, I’m so glad. September in Portland, is the best month, in fact, we got married in September on a clear 80-degree-day three years ago. It’s usually warm, dahlias are blooming, apples and peaches are plentiful and the garden is usually overflowing with veggies to harvest.
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Composting at home is a great way to prepare your own soil and manage organic matter from your yard. It is a chore, so if you decide to do it, know that it’s not something you can just pile up and hope will come out perfect. The first step, of course, is having a good place to store your compost. There are tons of solutions out there that you can buy. And some of them I’d definitely recommend, especially if you’re composting food waste, I’ll list my favorites at the end. Most of these are too small to accommodate the organic matter our yard produces and we have a small yard. We have hundreds of rotten apples and pears, leaves and end of year veggie garden material, and this year we have tons and tons of grass. We’re remove a significant portion of our grass and replacing it with wood chips and mulch, and it’s too heavy to put in the city compost collection. This week, we were graced with a load of wood chips from my husband’s company (he’s an arborist and one of the crews had taken down some incense cedars), so we ended up, unexpectedly, with about 10 cubic yards of wood chips. Eek! So, Kyle started the work of removing grass much earlier than we expected and now we need a place to put the old grass and get it to decompose so it doesn’t grow somewhere else!
Read MoreWe have put some serious work into our deck and a bit of time into our yard, so when we sat down on the deck for a cocktail to relax and looked around what first caught our eye’s was the ugly fence along our driveway adjacent to our other neighbor’s house. We could see into her yard, the past owner of our house had left a bunch of garbage and there were two large former fence post footers with bent iron poles sticking out. It wasn’t just ugly it was also a hazard for our kiddo.
The plan was to get rid of all the garbage that had been stored there, pull out the cement/brick and old footers and then build a trellis and plant something that climbs to create a screen from/for our neighbors and have a planting bed. Our driveway has been challenging to make look not ugly, so this was one step closer to beautifying it.
I didn’t take a proper before picture of the space, but here’s the best one I’ve got. Just imagine it like this, but uglier.
Read MoreHere’s a list of the most common climbing plants and where and when to plant them.
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Before planting, I want to give my reminder that if there’s something wrong with your trees, then contact an arborist. Don’t hire a landscaper to check on your trees or prune them. Landscapers are wonderful, but they don’t have the knowledge, skills or licenses to care for trees. Emily Henderson shared her experience of paying her gardener to prune her trees a few years ago (spoiler: he nearly killer her trees) and ruined their back yard. Tree care isn’t cheap, so plan on getting each tree pruned every 5 - 7 years.
One thing you can do to care for your trees and to give them the best chance at a long life is to plant them properly. The best time for you to plant might be the summer, but the best time for trees is in early spring or fall (really any time during dormancy). Following that schedule is best, but I know that’s not always realistic, so do what you can.
Read MoreOften, very often, I start projects that turn out to be a lot more work than I expect them to be. Other times, projects happy out of need or convenience. In the case of our deck renovation it was both. My mom was in town last week to help out with my nephew and had a day off from babysitting. She offered to stain our deck that day. We had been hoping to do this at some point, but jumped at the chance to have some help. All I had to do was clean off the old stain and prep the deck for the new stain and I had a little more than a week to do it. Seemed easy. It wasn’t. Here’s the rundown of how I re-stained our deck.
Read MoreThe last few weeks have been spent getting our garden together for spring. Much of the work is cleanup and maintenance, which is exhausting, but always ends up being incredibly satisfying. We also indulged a bit and bought some plants for a few bare spots in the yard and it’s made a world of difference.
Read MoreWhen I get bored, I like to peruse Redfin and look around the area and see where I might want to move to (or not). This week there have been some gems.
When I think of Portland, I definitely don’t think of houses like this. The description says “Close to downtown Portland yet worlds apart!” Which is half true. This is worlds apart from downtown Portland AND worlds away. It’s actually in a town called Damascus, Oregon, that, if we’re being generous, we’ll say is in the Portland metro. Anyway, the pictures speak for themselves. It’s been on the market for 289 days, so you’ll have to act fast if you want it. But I think the $5.6M price tag and 3 bed 4.5 baths (???) are calling you.
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The last few weeks have been busy! I’m taking a class on Thursdays on Parent Child Relationships focused on Toddlers and it has been so fascinating. The class is run by two graduate students and I am loving it. I haven’t read a single parenting book, so it’s been great to learn things about parenting and communication with my kiddo. I definitely recommend classes like this because even if you don’t learn anything you get to know other parents and also learn that you are doing great, no matter your parenting style.
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Our goal is to have our basement completely renovated in a year. We have to be realistic about how much time we can actually commit to projects and this is a big one. Since we are trying to use it as an investment and potentially we’ll have guests staying there, we want to make sure we do everything the way we want the first time around in the most affordable way possible.
Read MoreThis week went by so fast! I had about 5 minutes in my garden. I did get to prune a couple rose bushes in between work and picking up the babe at daycare, you can read my guide to pruning roses here. I did get to read some, so here’s the run down on what was on my mind this week. We did pull down the cabinet in the pic below, which also has some other notes about what we’ve done and will do in the future (not including obviously painting or replacing the cabinets and the blue vinyl (BLUE!) countertops.
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It’s about this time every year, after I’ve passed my ugly rose bushes 10 or 12 times, that I Google how to prune them. I’m always second guessing my knowledge, maybe it’s because I live in Portland, and the Rose Test Garden sets a high bar. Your signal that it’s time to prune roses in spring is when you see all the bright yellow forsythia popping up around town. There’s probably a way to tell by your zone too, but that takes research and planning and I don’t do that. Half my roses have already pushed leaves and buds out, but I’m pruning them down anyway, because YOLO.
Read MoreYou know how when you are about the run out of shampoo, you become super conservative with how much you use. Then you add some water to the bottle to make it go a little further. Why don’t we do that when the bottle is full? So annoying. Same thing for the old paycheck. Our new mortgage plus daycare, plus all the fixes we’ve had to do has motivated us to start trimming down on spending, so I’ve been researching money-saving tips and energy-saving hacks. We’re focusing on not spending money on things we don’t really need, lowering our monthly bills, and trying to get better deals on the things we do need to buy. I would LOVE to hear (read?) your tips for all these things.
Read MoreIt think you all know already that I hate grass. That sounds too negative, because really I like lots of color, low-maintenance and earth-saving landscaping and unfortunately, grass is none of those things. Before I launch into some of my favorite landscape ideas/trends I’m going to list some of the benefits of breaking up with your lawn:
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I was thinking about all the things I was going to include in my weekly wrap up while I was driving home from work, but there was a brief interruption in our evening when we started to smell a smell coming from the basement.
The last time an odor emanated from down there we ended up having to call a plumber, so a feeling of doom started to settle in. It smelled a little gassy and then we glanced outside and saw some lights flashing at the end of the block. Kyle went down to see what was up and if they knew anything about the stank—which was growing stronger.
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I’ve been talking about blogging about our house since two houses ago and now I am finally prioritizing this endeavor. 2018 brought crazy changes to our lives including welcoming our lovely perfect daughter into the world and selling our beloved tiny orange bungalow in the Alberta Arts District. All that and returning to work at my full time job as a mother has made want to think more about what makes me happy and the life I want for my little girl—a fun, happy one that allows her to focus on things she’s passionate about.
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