New Little Old House

I can’t believe it’s August 22 and I haven’t harvested a single tomato! I have plenty of green ones, but not a hint of ripening. That’s too bad; tomatoes are my favorite.

In better news, my cucumbers (second attempt) have gone gangbusters. I might have to send them home with people at our party on Friday.

Everything else is coming in very slowly… it all looks green and lush, but isn’t yielding much. I’ve got two banana peppers (that’s it from six pepper plants) and a hint of broccoli developing. The peas have sprouted their last and the lettuce bolted long ago in the heat. Ah well, maybe next year will be more typical.

Saturday was my only day off until at least September 4. I spent six hours of it working on the porch and yard—exactly what I had been looking forward to all week. It seems backwards that I like to work on my days off, especially when I get so few of them between two jobs. But I find much of the work around here relaxing.

I don’t love all housework: I will always loathe laundry and I can’t get excited about dishes. This place is not spotless. But I really enjoy cooking, gardening, yardwork, decorating, and taking on big improvement projects. Sometimes the work itself is enjoyable: it can be creative, meditative, calming, and often an excuse to enjoy some fresh air. More often than not, though, what I like best is the finished result. There’s a unique sense of accomplishment when you create something that you’ll get to enjoy every day. I find it way more satisfying than doing the same projects for someone else; I’d much rather work on our home than our rental duplex any day.

I think the value of homemaking is right in the word: making home. Creating your own space that’s more than just a house. Taking an active role in a sanctuary that reflects and nurtures you. Having this house is an enormous privilege and we’d be remiss if we didn’t value it, didn’t make it our home.

I haven’t had much time for writing lately thanks to some weekend getaways, but this weekend’s trip up north afforded me a chance to browse the Ikea catalog. Sam and I might have found the perfect bedroom storage solution to supplement our small room with a smaller closet. Behold: 

Two wardrobes like this would fit the limited space we’ve got, while serving as the nightstands we don’t currently have (as I’ve written before, I’ve been using a cut-up Three Buck Chuck box). Having more storage might help us keep our clothing put away better and we’d do a better job of wearing and paring because we could actually see what we have. (Young House Love has made these wardrobes, too.)

I may be so excited about this idea that I designed the wardrobes on Ikea’s website. One problem: the system is much more expensive than we’d like to spend. The other problem: these wardrobes are too big for our bedroom! Sam’s side of the bed is only 14” from the wall. On my side, the open door comes within about 1” of the mattress, so my nightstand ends up behind the door when it’s open. That gives us 16” of depth to work with, though there’s a few feet of width behind the door. Our two sides don’t need to match, but it would be nice. I’m so enamored with the idea of adding more vertical storage and taking advantage of wall space (the only kind of space we have in there) that we’ll keep trying to figure out a solution.

While the colors above don’t resemble ours, I do like the printed fabric above the bed. The great news is we’re already halfway there! Thanks to a Groupon to Dali Decals we scored a deal on some decals to substitute for a headboard. I wanted to put them up soon, but now they might have to wait until we can buy and install some storage. Patience, patience!

How do we fill a free Sunday at the O’C/T household? With 5000 pounds of gravel, of course!

We had two projects to do with all of that gravel. The first was pretty urgent: our alley. The alley behind our house is actually an easement alley, meaning that each of the neighbors owns the section that runs across their property, and we agree to let the others use it. The six houses have to do the snow removal and maintenance ourselves.

We are lucky enough to have the largest section and the part that’s on a slope. Over the past two summers, big rainstorms have washed out our part of the alley.  A few weeks ago the crevasse got too bad to procrastinate any more; the alley was barely traverseable. The Toberman Trench, as we called it, was 70 feet long and over a foot deep in some places.

Sam and our friend Bryan get all of the credit for the alleyway job. While I was working on the front porch, they scooped up what had washed out, filled in the hole with that and the gravel we bought, and used a compactor to get it all packed in nice and tight. We hope it will hold up well for at least a few years.

(I think this photo belongs in a Ford ad. Gotta love our truck for projects like this.)

I helped out with part II: the parking pad. The space between our house and the next-door neighbor’s is narrow, shady, and weedy. I call it the ugly patch. The back portion adjoining our driveway is especially hideous because there’s some busted-up concrete, so even weeds are patchy. We think there used to be a parking pad there, and that’s exactly what we planned to do again. As I’ve written before, we will eventually join the parking pad to a French drain along the side and rain garden in front.

We put down some landscape cloth and then spread the remaining gravel across it.

We need to haul some more gravel and do another round of compacting, but the finished parking pad will look largely like this. Our garage is tiny and we have a lot of gadgets, so this will be a nicer place to store the snow blower, truck topper, etc. than our driveway. A big sheet of gravel may not be attractive but it’s much better than the ugly patch and a cluttered driveway.

All of that gravel made for an exhausting afternoon, especially for Sam. But we feel so good for having finished those grueling projects.

Our porch is not pretty. In fact, it’s beyond ugly. It’s the one space we haven’t really touched at all, except to take down the awful bamboo shades we inherited.

We haven’t worked on the porch for several reasons. First, it’s literally falling off of the house. At some point it will need to be completely torn off and replaced. That’s a big and expensive project far off in the future, but it means we don’t want to pour tons of time and money into perfecting the porch right now.

The porch is also just a lot of work. The window sills are all rotten (and some are really crooked due to the porch falling off), a few of the window panes are missing or cracked, and the whole thing is just covered in grime and about 15 layers of peeling paint. We’re afraid to pull up the gold shag carpet.

But we’d really use the porch a lot more if it weren’t so embarrassingly ugly. It would also be nice if porch gave visitors an accurate first impression of our home. So we’re finally getting around to a makeover. First, we had to clean out all of the stuff:

I spent an entire afternoon scrubbing the walls. We used some peel-stop paint and then primer to improve the worst spots. Getting a perfect paint job would take weeks with all that we’d have to strip, scrape, and sand, so we’re not aiming too high.

For now, we just want to get the place painted and put down some new carpet on top of the old. We’ve already got a bit of furniture that will be fine for the time being. Down the road we’ll get the windows passably fixed. There’s also a window opening into the office/front bedroom that someone inexplicably boxed out and turned into a shelf unit from the inside. (So ugly… one of those many wtf moments you encounter in a house that has changed hands many times over many years.) We’ve got the window to put in that spot, so we’ll do that at some point.

Soon I’ll have some photos to share of the prettification part!

I recently acquired a free leek. I am pretty sure I have never cooked with leek before, so I dove into my cookbooks to figure out what to with it. Turns out leeks are usually paired with potatoes, which is super because I love potatoes.

I was drawn to a soup in Vegetarian: The Best Ever Recipe Collection because I liked that it included other veggies, not just leek and potato. Here’s my slight adaptation:

1. Dice and saute half an onion and a few cloves of garlic.
2. Add in 4 cups vegetable broth, one leek (chopped), and two small potatoes (chopped). Simmer for about 10 minutes.
3. Stir in a small head of broccoli (chopped) and about 1.5 cups of peas. Season with salt, pepper, and bay leaf. Simmer 10 more minutes.
4. Puree to desired consistency (bonus: you don’t have to chop things super-small at the start). I only have a Magic Bullet, but it took just four quick batches. I left the soup somewhat chunky. 

The overall verdict: not bad. This was really quick and simple to make. I like that the soup tastes like summer-fresh veggies and that it would probably be just as good cold as warm. But it was a little bland this first time around. Lemon would be a great addition, as would more garlic. I look forward to leeking again!

Just like the house, our yard was really neglected when Sam bought the place. The only good thing it had going for it was our enormous lilac bush on the front corner of the yard.

The other houses in our little matching row have extremely small yards, but we lucked out by having a double lot. We have alleys along both the back and side, so it’s not a super-private oasis. But we have a garage and huge driveway while still enjoying a lot of green space.

One of Sam’s first improvements was to pave the driveway. We’ve also put in a retaining wall, garden, and three trees. (Shout-out to the City Trees program for making that affordable). The bonfire pit has been moved and rebuilt, though our amateur concrete job hasn’t held up that well.

The little solar lights along the retaining wall were a great buy this spring: $15 and 5 minutes of installation added a really nice nighttime touch.

As time goes on and we discover how we use our yard, we’ve developed a better vision for the space. We want to build a patio so the grill and dining set have a home. We need to get around to mulching and planting the strip alongside the house. We’d also like to put up a small section of fencing along the front to make the yard feel a lot more private. The garden and new serviceberry bush/tree help with that along the alley side.

And we have a big makeover to do on the other side of the house: a gravel parking pad in back, drain tile along the side, and a rain garden in front. Right now it’s just an ugly weedy area, but we hope to complete the project this fall.

We had a movie party in our yard last weekend, and it was really fun. Offbeat Home published my write-up about how other people can host one, too.

The garden is still far behind where it should be by this time, but it’s looking better. Blossoms are popping up here and there, especially on the peas:

The peppers look the deadest, but they are sporting some blossoms nonetheless. The broccoli is the only veggie variety still flowerless (but even it is looking healthier than it used to).

Wow… this site is inspiring! I want to become a Jell-o shot gourmet now. I especially like the idea of Jell-o and fruit kebabs.