patio and kitchen path – Page 2 – A picture and a thousand words

Protected: Yellow

Anti-shrub, apparently

I’ve been noticing that this “outside twice a day” toddler program on weekends has been having a great effect on the backyard. We’ve been out weeding and pruning months earlier than our norm, and parts of the yard really look great as a result. This weekend, weeding finally dropped on the priority list in favor of large-scale shrub maintenance.

I finally finished taking back the shrub outside the kitchen window (this is an in-progress shot):

It was overgrowing the pathway, and the moment of truth came when I realized that one of the MASSIVE 20+ foot things up the street was the same bush. I’d been noticing that my attempts to politely cut it back a bit weren’t having much effect, but I guess I thought it just wanted to be a *little* bit taller and bigger and then it would be satisfied. Seeing the monster version was enough to bring on major surgery. It took three afternoons and an unbelievable about of work with the clippers and the saw, but I think we’re finally down to a spare, balanced shape that will grow out well over the next year. I was please with myself for just doing the whole thing in one go instead of thinking that I’d do part now and the “other half” in six months when the first part grew out (my standard shrub-pruning mistake.) Hopefully I didn’t kill it. I keep wondering what Kevin’s dad will think of my work – I can’t decide if he’ll be impressed or shake his head and ask “what I was going for, exactly”. 🙂

Next up were the huge laurel bushes in the side yard.

These are pretty in a certain sense, but hard to prune, huge, and blocking the walkway to the side yard.

When I realized they were sending out enormous runners at the house, that was the final straw.

So now they look like this, and I’ll dig up the stumps soon.

Here they are from the other direction – dramatic improvement.

More light!!

We’d been waiting for weeks for our permit to go through, and then early last week it finally did. On Thursday and Friday we had four trees taken out – yay! Kevin’s Dad actually did the research and found the tree company for us. I loved that – between the scam artists and the specialized lingo, it was great to just be able to trust his recommendation.

Our town limits the number of trees you can remove per year, and generally they require that you replace each healthy removed tree with a new native species. At least the permits are free. (We’ve both heard horror stories of people fined thousands for removing trees without a permit, so the free route seemed optimal.)

When we moved in, our quarter-acre property had 17 trees. Three were fruit trees that we won’t remove (especially after Kevin’s dad did such an amazing job pruning them for us), and one was a little (5″ at 4′ off the ground) hemlock that I cut down myself with the handsaw. So that leaves 14 trees – we just removed four, and will probably do another 5-6 in the next 2 or so years. Major motivations are more light, saving the roof and gutters, and saving the cars (we park in the driveway, and are perpetually fighting pitch). Here’s a very rough map of our property, with the trees we removed crossed out in blue, and the ones slated for the future crossed out in red.

This time, we removed two 65′ hemlocks from the east side of the house. At four feet off the ground, they measured 20″ and 22″ in diameter. (Both qualified as dangerous, given how much they were leaning and how close to the house they were. One of them has been a woodpecker haven all summer, and when they cut it down the center was all rotten. Whew. Good timing, us!) On the west side, we took down a 65′ fir tree that was 26″ in diameter four feet off the ground, and was about seven feet from the house. Our neighbours also told us that the top snapped off in the last windstorm and fell on the cars in our house’s driveway and the neighbours’ – explains why it looks so huge and filled out for “merely” 65′ of height. We also had the remains of the sweetgum removed. (Kevin’s dad cut down about 2/3 of the tree over Christmas – we would have let him keep going except that it was big enough to require a permit.)

Watching them take the trees down was simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. The drop zone was very small. They de-limbed the trees first, and dropped all of the big branches down with ropes.

(See the guy up there?) All of the small brush got chopped – they carted away two huge truck worths of it (I was so glad not to be stuffing it in the yard waste bins!). Once they had just the trunk left, they cut 16″ sections off and let them fall to earth. The thuds were ground-shaking, and we have some impressive divots. The rounds (live wood that’s 16″ tall by 20″+ in diameter) is impressively heavy, and it was falling far enough that by the time it hit ground it was really flying.

Before on the east side of the house:

And after:

Before on the west side of the house:

And after:

And from the front, before (photo from June):

And after:

Pictures don’t really do it, but I can’t even tell you how much more sky there is.

And we’re also delighted about all of our new space on the east side of the house (outside our bedroom window) – before it had really just been a forgotten area, but now it’s really worth cultivating. (And it finally gets enough direct sunlight to be able to support bushes and plant life.) We’re excited.

We still need to have three of the stumps ground, and have all of the wood removed. We have some friends who were excited about free firewood, so that should cut down our removal costs a bit. I’m also weighing the merits of just putting a few rounds a week in our yard waste bin. It will be about $150 to have it hauled away, so it’s just on the cusp of being worth it for the time and effort…

August flowers

Since we’re already in August (!), it seems time for a flower roundup. The hydrangea in the side yard has started flowering! The blue is gorgeous. Here’s my shot of the view from the house:

And Kevin’s shot with the macro lens and the tripod:

The roses keep blooming, and they’re really getting prettier and prettier. The biggest one is about 5″ in diameter.

Our sunflower is alive, but deeply unhappy. It’s very pale, stunted (only 16″ tall), and doesn’t follow the sun. Sorry, dude. If I could cook you up more light, I would.

I meant to take a photo of the daylilies of the front yard and then the rains came and I missed them. Also lovely while they lasted.

Well worth the money

When we bought the house, we knew that we’d be updating some of the windows at some point. The windows in the bedrooms and master bath are new and gorgeous. No complaints. The windows in the living and dining room are completely attractive, if not heat-retentive. But the windows in the fish room and the family room were old, ugly, leaky and failing. When we were decorating the family room for Christmas, we realized that two of the big windows were actually leaking large amounts of condensation (more than a spongeful, whenever I checked) and so windows suddenly zoomed up the priority list, replacing the attic and crawl space insulation. Out with the 70’s and 80’s brown aluminum crumminess, in with the 2008 vinyl happiness! We still need to repaint and replace the trim in the family room (tbd as soon as we finally choose a paint color). The walls are nearly prepped – I did a coat of primer on the entire room while listening to Super Tuesday results on the radio – and we need to get things painted before the new carpet gets installed on the 27th-ish (our appointment hasn’t been confirmed yet).

So, in the fish room, before:

And after:

(more after: isn’t this window the prettiest ever? I’m delighted. And the old one didn’t open – this will give us a breeze in the summer!)

(Like the moss on our tree? Go, Pacific Northwest! And when that hydrangea blooms?? Wow. Not to mention when we paint the walls. Or break down the quarantine tank and get those buckets and electrical cords out of there! Then it will *really* be classy!)

There are six windows in the family room. The far corner, before:

And after:

The patio corner before:

And after:

The top windows before:

And a long shot from the far side of the room, after:

Aren’t they neat! We’re already impressed at the difference in warmth, and every time I walk into the kitchen area, the fish room window just looks so clean and impressive to me. 🙂 Gorgeous.

Two afternoons of work well done

I’ve been wanting to post this for the last two weeks, and the weather keeps being crummy, and I can’t take pictures (either it pours, or there is NO light – those held hostage under the deep, dark Seattle clouds will understand). So pretend this was posted back on 12/27.

When we bought the house, I also bought a pruning book, read it, tried out a few things, and then gave up and decided to wait for better instruction. Kevin’s dad is an arborist, and both of his parents are gardeners, and so we and our yard have been waiting with high hopes for their visit. We weren’t disappointed. Our three fruit trees were massively pruned (and did they ever need it!), five pine trees and the half-rotten enormous leaf-producing monster tree outside the kitchen window were de-limbed, and our shrubs have been taken from unwieldy monsters into much more manageable creatures.

Kevin’s dad was impressed (to put it mildly) by all of our moss, but once he adjusted to see past it, it was a treat to watch him work. As gifts, his parents brought out a handsaw, many yards worth of screw-together poles, a saw attachment, and a neat little pulley-operated clipper attachment. In two full afternoons, we learned a lot about what to cut and how to go about it, but the best part was watching Kevin Sr. confront the branches on a tree.

The tree on the side of the house, for example, stands in the 3 yards between our neighbor’s fence and our house, looming over the plate glass window and the kitchen garden window. (photo from early November)

Working from a ladder and then from the room, he gradually took down about 2/3 of the tree, dropping all of the limbs down onto the same 2’ stretch of walkway. (after-photo from the opposite vantage point):

Same with the fruit trees – 20’ branches consistently avoided the two fences, the neighbours’ yards, and the squashable surrounding shrubs.

Kevin got to “raise the skirts” on the back five pine trees, though with slightly less grace. 🙂

I spent more time on the fruit trees and the shrubs, and cutting up enormous falling limbs with the handsaw. We amassed QUITE the brush piles. The main one is on the back patio

and the auxiliary one is by the six-foot-tall side fence.

The plan is to try to get rid of the side pile via our semiweekly yard waste collection, and then possible rent a chipper for the enormous guy out back. Good luck, us.

The two biggest successes were the tree out front by the driveway, and the fruit tree right out back. Before, the pine by the driveway hid the house almost completely from the street.

Whereas now, you can see the roofline! Kevin’s dad took the branches up the trunk about 8 feet (and it seems like more from the ground, since the limbs drooped so much). The front yard is so much lighter!

For comic relief feel free to ponder the mass of the branches removed vs the two 96-gallon, black yard waste bins to the right of the garage. Ha, ha…

You can see all of the cuts on one side of the trunk from this photo:

The backyard tree is another joy to me. The poor thing was hacked within an inch of its life and then abandoned, and the suckers had almost entirely taken over. (Picture, with snow for contrast, from a few weeks ago.)

Now, there’s a defined center-top, very few suckers (the two that were left have some of the only branches that are growing at the back of the tree, so they stayed), no more hacked-off knobs, and much sparser, healthier-looking branches. We’re delighted.

It’s still probably in its twilight years, but it looks so much less abused and dreadful.
Next step: convincing them all that we want them to visit for more than tree work. 🙂