House of Swank

Shopping The Parental Boutique

My parents are in the process of putting their house in the market in preparation for empty nester move #2 - after they got me out of my childhood home the downsized to a 3 bedroom place with a tiny yard that allowed them their basic comforts while allowing them to travel without worry of the yard going to shit and the ability to have parties when the mood struck them.

But now the mood to party rarely strikes them, and they're sick of the basic maintenance required for a home, occasionally the stairs are a pain in the ass, and it would be nice if they weren't 2+ miles from a bus line/store/coffee shop.  So they're downsizing yet again and planning to end up in some sort of apartment or condo.

In preparation for this they are significantly culling their possessions.  If they're not going to be partying anymore they don't need all of their party supplies and even traveling as much as they do there are only so many suitcases two people can use.

So I've been spending some time of late going through their house and laying claim to things that Sweetie and I want.  Thus far we've laid claim to:

• China (our second set!  Without ever registering for it!)
• A 100+ year old clock for our mantle
• Various serving dishes and a vase or two
• A tablecloth my grandmother embroidered.  It's not a very good embroidery job - puckers something fierce - but it's one of those "ugly, but it's family tradition" type things.
• A silver trunk that my Dad acquired while stationed in Japan.

By the end of this week we will also have 3 end tables which will work perfectly in our living room, but are too dark to work wherever my parents end up.

It is very, very, very, very odd to go through the house of your relatively healthy mother and start filling up shopping bags with her stuff.  I've been through this once before - during empty nest stage #1 my grandmother was moving simultaneously so my mom and I had to go through her things - but I was living a very mobile lifestyle at the time, and my mom was doing the same thing (and had first dibs), so it didn't seem quite as invasive a process.  But man, it's just weird.

The consolation is that many of these things (especially the clock and the tables) are items my parents treasure and cannot get rid of, but are a bit of a waste of space or won't fit their new decor.  While they fit our decor perfectly, and save us a ton of money to not have to go buy them for ourselves.

The second stage of the process will come once the house has been sold, and that is the garage sale.  I refuse to allow them to have this sale without me supervising.  Well, I trust my Mom, but not my Dad.

He gets excited in the heat of the moment and the success of the sale, and starts to case the joint for more things to sell.  During their garage sale during their last big downsizing this activity resulted in my father selling this:

That is an ice bucket in the shape of the helmet of a suit of armor, and one of the swankest things I have ever seen in my life.  And when I moved into the original House of Swank it was denied it's place of honor in that home because someone bought it at a garage sale.

10+ years later and I still give my dad crap about it. 

So now I've decided that I supervise any garage sale my parents host.  I accept that my parents want to keep some of their stuff for themselves, and I've got it on "layaway" until the appropriate time arises - I'm even a bit surprised on how quickly I got the tables out of layaway - but they can't go selling my layaway items out from under me!

The Answer: 140 gallons

The question:  If I let the "grass (mostly moss with some weeds mixed in at this point)" in the back yard grow to a height of two feet, what will the volume of the clippings be when it's all mowed down?

Your standard yard waste container is 64 gallons.

Just play around with that math in your head for a little bit.

The Lazy Environmentalist

Mondays are trash pick-up days for the House of Swank.

The general weekly routine is to take the trash and recycling out to the curb Sunday after dinner.  Yesterday was a crazy day in the SwankPoet household, and by the time the end of the day rolled around it totally escaped me that the trash needed to be taken out.

No worries, the garbage collectors don't usually come until early afternoon, and the recycling pick-up even later than that.  I'd just do it in the morning.

So, of course, this morning, right as I was getting ready to get to it all, the garbage collectors came early.

The good news is that, even with the smallest size trash bin available from our service, we produce a small enough amount of waste each week that we can let it roll a week without worries of filling the bin.   Recycling is a bit more of a challenge - the collection receptacles we use inside (Trader Joe's cheapo reusable shopping bags) are a bit on the full side, but we can easily empty them into the recycling bins and still have plenty of room left over for next week.

If I forget again next week we may run into problems, though, so perhaps I should put something on the calendar.

Getting My Money's Worth

I just paid $135 to have an electrician come to my house and replace a switch.  OUCH!

However, he was a good man and made sure I got my money's worth out of the trip.

First off, $135 to ensure I'm not going to electrocute myself is money well spent.  I didn't know the switch needed to be replaced.  I knew one of the basement light fixtures was not working, and I knew there was no current at the fixture but there was current at the switch.  Turns out if I'd opened up the switch I could have used my tester to confirm it was a bum switch, and the electrician talked me through how to do that so that if the same problem happens in the future I'm not out the money.

He also noticed we've got non-grounded outlets throughout the upstairs of our house.  And talked me through how I can swap all of them out for three-prong outlets safely and legally.  It's a bit of an undertaking time-wise, but it will definitely be added to the list of things to do in the house.

And, when it comes time for us to update the electric in the basement I know who we're going to call.

When Rooms Collide

Sweetie and I thought we were such geniuses.   The spare TV would go into the guest room, so that the room could do double-duty as the sick room.  When one of us was sick we could set up house in the sick room with the TV and the computer while we nursed ourselves back to health and helped prevent transmitting the disease to the other.

We did not consider that we might be sick AND have house guests simultaneously.

I'm currently running a fever of 100.9.  Sweetie's close friend is staying here tomorrow night.

Let's hope the fever breaks quickly, or one of us may be wearing a mask to bed tomorrow night.

Rethinking Rhododendrons

Earlier I mentioned that one of our rhododendron plans looked like it might have to be relocated due to its proximity to our power line.  After today's expedition in the garden, I'm rethinking that.

As I plod my way through the task of getting our yard in shape I'm coming to a very blatant realization.  The people who lived here before us were lazy in the yard.  As long as it didn't look like total shit they let it be, and if it looked like total shit they covered it up.  See:  weed sheet and barkdust covering more weeds than you could imagine.

Today I was weeding around another rhododendron, about 10 feet away from the earlier problem child, and noticed it had some of the same issues as the first plant.  I also tackled the bush next to that, which SEEMED to be in lovely shape.  It was full of foliage, nicely shaped, and bloomed for a VERY short time early in the season.

Turns out that bush was such a tangle of branches I almost had to destroy the whole thing to get it where branches were in some sort of order related to the main trunk of the bush.  I suspect it had never been pruned in its life, or at least for a VERY long time.

So now my diagnosis is neglect and disease.  I bet if I pull back the weed sheet the trunk and roots of all of our bushes are being smothered by weeds.

Treatment:  prune the hell out of everything to try to bring things back to life.  As soon as the yard doesn't look totally overgrown with weeds get rid of the barkdust and weed sheet and start bringing things back to life.

Welcome to the Jungle

I started to mow the lawn last night.  I did not finish the job.

Our lawnmower is a cordless electric that, according to the instruction book, can mow 1/4 acre on a single charge. 

The lawn was long enough that after about 500 square feet the mower said "Fuck that shit, I'm done for the night" and lost it's charge.

Between charging the mower and spotty spring weather and the fact that I still need to do some branch removal before I can mow the back yard, I suspect I'll be done mowing the lawn sometime in May.

White Litter

I spent a fair amount of time working on the yard this weekend, and am proud to report we no longer have the white-trashiest house on the block.  That's more a statement on the fact that our ratio of cars:driveway space is 1:1 and several houses in the neighborhood go much higher than that.  We'll vault even higher in the rankings once the lawn has been mowed, which will take place as soon as the mower is fully charged and able to tackle the task.

Some thoughts/observations/plans for the yard:

The lawn desperately needs to be mowed, thatched and reseeded.  Eventually I think I'd like to minimize the lawn in the front yard in favor of pretty plantings and such.

Previous owners of the house loved bulbs - both tulips and daffodils are plentiful.  However, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to where they are planted.  Once they've died down for the year I plan on relocating them either to along the front walkway or along the sidewalk.  Right now I'm leaning towards relocating ALL of them to along the front walkway, including the ones in the planter box next to the front door, and re-purposing the planter box into an herb garden.

There is a rhododendron directly under where the power line comes into the house.  The plant appears to be burnt in several locations.  My powers of deduction tell me this is somehow related to the power line, so I'm contemplating turning that stretch of the yard into a rock garden.  Or perhaps bricking it in and putting a bench out there.  Something non plant related.

I'd like to plant a durable ground cover in the strip between the sidewalk and the street.  I just need to figure out what that ground cover should be.

The yard must have been in sad looking shape when the previous owners went to put it on the market.  They solved this by throwing down a weed protection sheet and throwing bark dust on top of it.  Two problems with this:  They didn't actually kill off the existing weeds before throwing down the sheet and some of them are surviving underneath the sheet and/or popping through gaps and holes.  Second, I hate the look of bark dust - probably holdover resentment from youthful summers spent having to spread the damn stuff and the ensuing splinters and such.  In the strip between the sidewalk and the street it currently covers some sad looking red lava rock. 

I'm really glad Sweetie and I are planning to stay in this house for a long time, because it's going to take YEARS to get this yard into good shape.

Triage

The temperatures have been topping 60 degrees here in the great Pacific Northwest, so today is the day I have finally acknowledged that we have a yard and started to do something about it.

The landscaping the house came with met the minimum requirements of landscaping around here.  (Dying) lawn in the front and back, a few rhododendrons a few rose bushes, and a healthy dose of fresh bark dust.  There are also three large, unidentified, trees in the back and a handful of unidentified bushes amongst the rhodies.

Because the lawn was in such crappy shape, and we had enough to bother ourselves with inside the house, upon moving in I proclaimed that I was ignoring the yard until spring.  Well, spring's not officially here yet, but the time has come all the same.

I have done minor gardening/yard care in the past:  I mowed lawns at both my house and my grandmother's house into my teen years, I had a vegetable garden once or twice growing up, and Gary Payton's apartment had a strip of plants surrounding it that I tried to prune and tame.  Still, I've decided I need to take it slow.  This will keep me from saying fuck it all, and hopefully prevent me from making any grave mistakes.

I've got a subscription of Sunset magazine coming my way for my birthday this year (Thanks Mom and Dad!), which will help give me a good to-do list.  Hopefully I'll be to the to-do list part of the process by the time the subscription kicks in.  A copy of the Western Garden Book has been acquired, and will make it's way here the first week of April - I could have had it this weekend, but have told my Mom she can obtain a replacement to hold up the lamp in the living room before I take it.

But it's going to take some time before we get to the point where we can plant anything.

For the time being I've decided to take 15 minutes a day to work in the yard.  Enough to make a visible dent in what needs to be done, and I'm focusing on a small enough piece of the yard in that time I can start to really get a feel for what needs to be done, and stat to prioritize.

First:  Getting rid of the dead stuff.  For the next few days this will be small branches that have blanketed the back yard (I suspect they are from the unidentified trees).  From there will move on to some random dead plants here and there.

Second:  Getting rid of the live stuff I don't want anymore.  Weeds.  Things that have started growing that I just don't like or is out of place.

Third:  Take care of the living stuff that I want to stay.  The lawn is in pitiful shape.  In the front yard it's just brown and pitiful.  The back yard seems more alive, but when you get close up you realize it's the moss that makes it green and lush and not actual lawn.  This will be a big, ongoing project.  I'm sure the rhodies and roses and other plants will need some maintenance as well, but that still needs to be investigated.

Finally:  Start to move forward.  There's already an area set aside for a vegetable garden.  I think I'd like to do a compost pile, but will need to do some planning and figuring on the best place for that to go.  I'd like it to be hidden near the heat pump, but not sure if there's space.  There are also many, many opportunities to add new plants to the mix that currently exists.

It's going to be fun.

The Dining Room

Before:

After:

Between the time we closed on the house and we moved all of our furniture in the dining room scared me more than any other room.  I had to try to plan out furniture arrangement before our furniture had arrived.  And I had to estimate the size of our furniture based on memory and sizes available at IKEA.

Our dining room table has four leaves and when fully extended can comfortably seat 10+ people.  Even when fully collapsed it comfortably seats four, and you can get six around if you don't mind being a little cozy.  So I had this image in my mind that the thing was MASSIVE.

I feared we would have to move the china hutch to a different part of the house.  Which was a completely unacceptable compromise, because that is where I keep the china and stemware and linens.  And if my wine and beer glasses were stored off in a corner of the basement somewhere that would be a very bad world indeed.

The preliminary sketch I had made allowed both the table and hutch to fit into the room.  It was just questionable as to how many people would actually be allowed to sit at the table.  Needless to say, I was holding my breath when the movers were bringing the things into the house.

Crisis averted, everything fits like a charm.  With plenty of room to get around the table, and a nice walkway between the living room and kitchen to boot.  We will even be able to extend the table as needed to accommodate more guests.  To take it to its full length we will likely need to move it into the living room, but that will be a rare occurrence if it ever happens at all.  Which is a bit ironic, considering it was frequently extended at the condo because we had nowhere else to entertain people.  We could fit about 5 into the living room, but 12 in the dining room.

Any changes I'd like to make to this room are fairly minor, so it will probably stay looking like this for a long time.  I'd like to do some sort of window treatment in addition to the mini blinds that are already there.  I'd like to get some more tablecloths to use, just to break up so much WOOD being in the room.  I'd like to replace the light fixture and, when that is done, probably recenter it over the table - it's centered in the room now, but with the china hutch where it is it throws it off center over the table.  I'd definitely like to paint at some point, but selecting a color is going to be tough.

But for now it serves its purpose well.