After the early morning siding-over-brick scare, things progressed well the rest of the day. The guys finished trimming out the inside of the windows upstairs and got up wood and insulation on the back of the house. I think by tomorrow they should have the sides done as well. By Wednesday or Thursday the siding should be here and we (i.e. they) can start putting it up.
When Contractor Sal showed up, he told me that he’d talked to Cabinet Guy and the final correct set of doors were being ordered today. Interestingly, he had to take some additional measurements because, you know, Cabinet Guy has no idea what cabinets are actually in my kitchen. I told Contractor Sal that I was quite impressed at how quickly he was able to get Cabinet Guy to do stuff.
So here’s the back of the house. Honestly, I think the blue insulation looks better than the siding did.
It’s 7:50am. I know some of you are up and going at this hour, but not us. In fact, the girls are not even awake. They’re still up in bed waiting for me to come back.
*I* am up because I heard pounding - the siding guys are here. I went out to give them keys to get into the basement. I found them attaching wood strips to the front of my house. They were preparing to put siding OVER THE BRICK. Oh that is not even a little bit cool. So I explained and I think they understood that they were absolutely not to put ANY siding over ANY brick. No no no. Just replace the old siding that’s there. Oh man. What a disaster this could have been. Ug.
Everything is finally planted at my house. My radishes and carrots have sprouted. Friday, after the window guys left, I put in peas, green beans, yellow beans, and spinach. Today, it was a beautiful 75 and sunny (sorry, family back in Chicago with your 8″ of snow!) and I put in the cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, and cantaloupe. The only things left to go in this spring are tomatoes and peppers, but they have to wait until my next trip to Home Depot. I still need to pick up a few bags of topsoil to bring up the level in the new part of the garden.
I also planted some flowers, but I’m much less optimistic about that. I’ve set up what will be a little sunflower forest against the west fence. I have 8′, 5′, 3′, and 1.5′ varieties. I think the different levels will look pretty cool if they grow. I planted sunflowers last year and exactly 0 of them came up. Despite that failure, I can’t say how tempted I was to dig up the lawn and plant a sunflower forest. The main thing that kept me from doing it was the muddy mess that the girls would track in without any grass out there.
Other flowers went in, too. I got some bluebells for under the dogwood tree in the front yard (hoary for shade loving flowers). My friend Paul, who tsked at my landscaping, also gave me a few kinds of seeds from his garden - blanket flower (which went in by the veggie garden), hollyhock, and hyssop. He tells me it’s hard to kill them. I have taken this as something of a challenge.
Anyway, for now I just have dirt and staked rows, but in a couple weeks this should be quite green!
They are so much better on the ground than in the house. See, the problem is they matched the house. Look how terribly the new windows stand out!
They’re all shiny and new against the peeling cracked paint, exposed wood, and old wavy siding.
Thankfully, we’re starting on the new siding Monday. This is the issue that’s bothered me most about the house since I moved in. I really can’t picture what it’s going to look like when this is all nice and clean and fresh.
Windows: They are here! Unfortunately, it rained today so they just sat in my office. Contractor Sal is sending a team tomorrow and they plan to get all 6 installed. Horay!
Goodbye old inefficient windows with nasty glazing and cracks and rattles during wind:
Hello fancy Anderson windows
Dorks (aka Cabinet Guy): Contractor Sal is going after him. I explained the problem and Sal said “I will see him this afternoon and get this taken care of.” Horay!
K Update: Today, I took K back to the ophthalmologist. She had an emergency trip to the vet a month or so ago for very high pressure in her eyes. She was in tremendous pain. Since then, we’ve seen the vet ophthalmologist a few times. The eye drops K is on have been helping and we all expected everything to be fine today. However, they discovered lesions on the back of her retina that weren’t there before. So the ophthalmologist consulted with the neurologist we saw after the seizure. He said that her eyes were so cloudy when she came in that he couldn’t see the retina. He thought that’s why the ophthalmologist was treating her, but during all the ophthalmologist visits her eyes had been clear. Thus, something happened to them after the seizure. They did some tests and talked and suspect that there might be a nasty lurking infection causing both problems. Instead of letting it get worse (if that’s what’s really the problem), we’ve started on 2 kinds of antibiotics 3 times a day for the next 2 weeks. Hopefully this really is one problem and all these problems will soon go away. An infection would be such an easy solution!
Cabinet Guy half responded to one of my emails today (did I mention his phone is disconnected?). Anyway, he said nothing about that paint and trim he allegedly has. However, he did say that the manufacturer needs more measurements to get me the correct doors. What this means to me is that he has no idea what cabinet I was supposed to have and thus he has to come back to figure out what it’s supposed to be.
How sad.
Fortunately, Contractor Sal will be here this week to start on the windows and siding. I told CG that he should tell Sal what he needs measured, and Sal can do it while he’s here. Cabinet Guy would not enjoy the attitude I’d give him if he showed up at my house.
So, a month from now I expect CG will send me another email saying he didn’t get my email of tonight and then he’ll set up a time in ANOTHER month to come measure things. Then, 3-4 months more and we’ll get the last doors. They will be wrong. 3-4 more months and we’ll get the right ones. Then 1 month before we can get them installed. So I’m predicting January 2010 as a finish date.
Today, Sunday, is the last day of Spring “Break”. It was the only spring-like day (and at that it was only 60), and the only day I stopped working for a little while to do a real project. It was a pressing one, too. I finally got out there and enlarged the garden, so it will be ready for planting next week.
Here’s how it was when I started.
My plan was to remove all the grass between the garden and the patio. I was going to leave a 1 foot space next to the patio for flowers, and then have the rest be for the fruits and veggies.
Have I mentioned how much I hate digging up sod? This was a smaller project, but still exhausting. The problem with removing grass is that a lot of dirt comes with it, even if you try to keep as much as possible. Thus, you end up with a sunk down garden that fills up with water when it rains and messes up house grading. I had this problem all summer last year until I was able to get enough dirt from one project or another to fill it in.
Removing all the grass today created this problem again. I did have a bit of a plan. I dug some big holes in the back of the yard and used that to raise up some of the garden.
That grassy spot between the holes WAS a hole before. It is our dog waste disposal hole from last month. I bet the sod I covered it with will do very well. I filled in the big hole with the sod that I removed, and kept the smaller hole for more dog waste disposal.
The dirt from these two holes was enough to raise up the edges of the garden and fill the flower area up to the right level.
Any project where you get to use the sawzall is a good project, and I got to use it a couple times here as I fit together a couple railroad ties from other parts of the garden to edge this out.
So here it is our new, bigger garden with a little flower bed.
I left the rose bush by the window, though I’m not a rose person. Really, I don’t have a lot of luck with flowers. My friend Paul has kindly expressed disgust at my landscaping skills and made it a project to recommend things to me that will be hard to kill. You can see some of the results in the flower side - a bunch of red day lillies that will hopefully look like this:
As for the veggie part of the garden, which is most important, next weekend is the big planting weekend. The strawberries row is still there, and you can also see my sage plant and some oregano coming back to life. I have radishes and carrots in the ground already. Tomatoes and peppers are growing in the house, and I just started watermelon and cantaloupe. Next weekend, I’ll plant peas, two kinds of beans, onions, and potatoes. In a couple weeks we’ll get to the transplants plus zucchini, cucumbers, and basil.
First, a mini-update. K’s MRI was yesterday and everything is normal. I guess that’s good, although it doesn’t feel nice to have no reason for the seizures. Still - no reason is better than a brain tumor. We’re all doing fine now.
So, on to the kitchen project I’ve been planning to post about for a month. This is the view of my newly cleaned out pantry shelf:
I have a pressure cooker (thanks Mom and Dad!!!), and lots of jars and lids. Since I’ll be both growing my garden and receiving fruits and veggies from the CSA, I’m going to start canning this summer. My Mom used to can all sorts of things when I was little - the smell of tomatoes still reminds me of those days she would make huge batches of spaghetti sauce and can them. I’m going to try a bunch of things and see how it goes. The top of the project list will be strawberry preserves once those start coming fast this spring.
Below is a picture of what my back stairwell looked like today when I got home from my Wed-Thurs trip to give a lecture. On Tuesday night, after everything with K, it did not look like this. It was full of raw sewage. As Blue Man Group says, Output flows in one direction - AWAY. It should not, under any circumstances, be coming to my little house. It hadn’t risen to the level where it was leaking into the basement, but it was nasty. NAS. TEE. It is also pretty much the opposite of what I needed that night.
Luckily, Contractor Sal came to the rescue. He and his team came to my house Wednesday while I was gone and took care of things. I’m very thankful that I have a contractor who I can tell “please fix it and I’ll pay what it costs” and know that he will do it right and not take advantage of me.
I haven’t talked to him since I got back, but I’m wondering if this is related to the plumbing problems I’ve been having. The toilet flushing issue is one I mentioned here. That recurred this week along with a very slow draining tub upstairs. It could be that it’s all coincidental with this sewage, but it would be nice if this rooting would fix everything.
With no exaggeration, it really has been the worst 24 hours of my life.
On New Years Day, K had a seizure. She recovered quickly and didn’t have any problems until last night. She had another and I was prepared to deal with it, time it, handle her, etc. I wasn’t happy, but I was prepared. It was a very long seizure (5 minutes) and as she came out of it, she sat up with the hunting dog expression - ears way up, staring very focused at the table lamp. I turned it off, but she was really freaked out. She started growling and if Pi or I approached her, she would run away and growl. It took a minute to figure out what was going on, but she basically didn’t know who either of us were and was very aggressive. I had to lock her in the sun room for 2 hours. Any time I approached she would growl or bark.
I was convinced that she had fried her brain and I’d lost her. She did eventually come around, and came back to normal, but I spent last night and most of today thinking I’d have to put her down. If this were to happen again when I weren’t home, I could see her going after Pi. Obviously, I couldn’t come home to find Pi hurt or worse because K was terrified after a seizure and lashed out.
So what’s the solution. The dogs have spent every second together for 8 years. I can’t even take one of them to the vet without the other freaking out. If one has to go in the basement for a minute, both sit on either side of the door waiting to come up. My feeling was that suddenly crating them or putting them in separate rooms would be traumatic for all three of us. It would totally upset their routines and their social connections. Still, I didn’t want her to attack Pi after another seizure. But my amazing vet Dr. Bob and I had a long talk tonight, and I once again returned to Orvis for a solution.
While I couldn’t lock them in separate rooms, K has picked the sunroom as her room. I rearranged it since moving in day, so the couch is right by the front window, and she can look out the front and side to keep track of things. She spends all her time in there. So I decided to get a gate for that room. She’ll stay where she spends most of her time anyway, but she and Pi and still see each other, sniff each other, and lay together by the gate. That will prevent any issues if she does seize again, but should limit the trauma.
For all the dogs we had growing up, it seemed very obvious that they were in pain and sick and at the end of their lives. It was the right thing to do to put them to sleep. I am sure it is terrible to make that decision, too, but then you at least know you’re doing the right thing. For K, she was not at the end (though she certainly has problems), but she has become unpredictable in a way that’s totally not her fault. Unpredictability and aggression are bad in a dog, but it feels much worse to think you need to put them down just because you can’t trust them. Thankfully, this solution will contain it to prevent any problems, and hopefully minimize the trauma to the girls.
