Dogs and Jen: Home Edition

Last year I planted raspberries. They died.

This week I planted new raspberries. Hopefully these will live and bear fruit.

My new washing machine arrived today. It’s red. It’s awesome. It’s doing my backed up laundry. w00t!

This is the back of my house.

Inspiration struck last week when I was cleaning up the yard.  It always looks so plain. I would add a window in that big space except that’s the pantry. Instead, I made it starry. $45 on eBay custom made in the white I wanted. Nice!

I love it. It’s got the nice colonial feel appropriate to my area, and stars are kind of a thing for me. Plus, it matches the little ones in the kitchen.

MOM AND DAD came to visit me this past weekend! In my preparations for their arrival, I did a lot of laundry. For the last load I threw in a load of red blankets and sheets, went for a bike ride, and when I got home the cycle was done but the blankets were soaking wet. Poor spinning has been an intermittent problem with my washing machine, so I put it on the spin cycle again to get rid of the extra water. Unfortunately, it made a weird grindy noise and didn’t spin.

We took the machine apart as a family today and determined it’s MESSED UP. Instead of screwing around with it, I bought a new washing machine.  I looked for excellent reviews on machines that weren’t ridiculously expensive. I went with a Whirlpool top-load washer. It has all good reviews, it was very affordable, and best of all, it’s red!

I had abandoned the idea of a red washer because of price, but this one just happened to be red. It was a very pleasant surprise. Yay! It will be delivered next Saturday and, in the meantime, I will try not to get too many clothes dirty. Good thing I did ALL my laundry before the big visit this weekend.

This week is spring break week and I’m using it to take care of a bunch of outside projects. The first is to clean up this tree that fell during the Snowpocalypse (note: this picture is from a few weeks ago; the snow is all gone now):

I got all the branches cut off and most of the trunk cut down. We’ll see if the compost pickup will take all the branches that I left for them. They are bagged, though a lot of the branches is sticking out of the bags.

After bagging the branches I went to a task that I hadn’t been looking forward to: the garden. Grasses and other weeds really took over when I was away for 3 weeks last summer and I was never able to reclaim it. Those things were still there so I needed to turn over the whole garden. If I had a rototiller I would have used that, but I don’t. Renting one seemed like a hassle I wouldn’t make myself go through. Instead, I just got out the shovel and turned it by hand. I raked it over and it looks pretty good. Later this week I’m going to pick up some landscape fabric to help keep the weeds down.

There is lots more to do out there, but this is a good start.

Remember that I was talking to Cabinet Guy back in February and he said he would get my doors ordered right away? Well today I woke up to an email from him:

Good morning jen,

They have to be custom made and finished. Please allow 8-10 weeks

Thank you

My guess is that this is 8-10 weeks from today, not from when he said they would be finished a month ago. Furthermore, I’m not sure why it takes 8-10 weeks to make a pair of doors, but such are the mysteries of cabinet guy.

This timeline puts delivery at the beginning of June. At that point, we will officially be over 2 years since the beginning of the kitchen project. That’s normal, right? Renovating an 8′X10′ kitchen would obviously take that long…

Our snow has been melting slowly but surely. As it disappeared it has revealed more damage.

I had been contemplating replacing the thorny bushes on the side of my front yard with raspberry bushes (why grow thorns when I can grow fruit). That has been forced up as the plan since most of those bushes are crushed and broken now. I ordered 10 3-year heritage raspberry bushes today, so I’ll soon be digging stuff up and replanting.

I’ve also been debating the landscaping on the front of my house since I moved in. That is also a newly urgent plan. The small pine trees on either side of the house had most of their branches stripped off by the snow. The other bushes are largely broken up. I realize they will eventually grow back, but I didn’t love any of them and I see no reason to leave it ugly when I can just do something nice.

That project will wait a bit. The need to repave my driveway has also become more urgent. There is a strip that’s gravel and it’s become kind of mushy since the snow melted. When I do that, I’ll also do the sidewalk. If I’m doing those, I should also fix the front stoop. I want to fix the first step, which is too short, and also widen the whole thing. Right now, only one person can stand up there and open the door. It’s cramped and I can’t put anything on the steps. I’d like to add about 18″ on either side, and this will obviously get rid of some of the space to landscape.

That is also a biggish project. I’ll have to get some quotes soon but I’m trying not to think about it for now. I’m kind of overworked lately and the raspberries will be plenty for me to do for now.

We’re down to probably 8″ of snow in the yard. This has made life much more fun for Pi and K who, until this weekend, couldn’t even walk around out there. They love the snow. Pi especially loves to push her tennis ball into the snow, move it around with her nose, pounce on it, grab it, and throw is somewhere else.

The one tree that we lost is still laying in the yard (and will be for a few more weeks). However, the girls are taking advantage of it. They have turned it into a fort. Both love to get in under there and hang out.

While the rest of my world is buried outside, I have four toasty warm trees in my house. About a month ago I bought four dwarf citrus trees: a key lime, meyer lemon, naval orange, and grapefruit. They are pretty small right now, but they will produce fruit. The lemon has just started blossoming and hopefully will give us a few fruits this year!

Another foot-ish fell on us here in our nation’s capital today. The novelty has worn off. The girls and I are both feeling pretty cooped up. Here are some pics.

This really shows the height. You can the top of my blue toter recycling can toward the right and the tip-top of my 4′ picket fence by the trees.

I had measured 32″ on Sunday. Some of that melted and compressed between then and Tuesday. Today, it measured about 42″ which means something like 12-15″ more than last night.

You can see it’s almost up to the windows in front:

But Pi and K are enjoying it even if they can’t run around much.