Yard project, after the landscaping

So here we are after the huge backyard landscaping project. We had this work done and boy are we glad we didn't attempt it ourselves.

Prior to the start of this, there was an ugly concrete "brick" retaining wall across part of the yard. That's now gone. There were two large areas where Bermuda grass had been allowed to grow over gravel, one from a giant play-set, one from an above-ground pool. The pool and play-set are long gone, now the gravel that was under them is also gone with new St. Augustine sod laid down.

There wasn't a single plant anywhere in the back yard. Now we've got somewhere around 200 plants in six beds. Three beds, each between 15 and 20 feet long are along the edge of the patio. Two beds about 20 to 25 feet long run along the side fences. And one bed runs the entire length of the back fence, about 70 to 75 feet.

Pictures from top to bottom are:

1. Looking along the length of the patio. Foreground right is the old dining set, soon to be replaced.
   
2. View of the large seating area, opposite end of the patio from pic above. New furniture here, most of it covered up. I'm going to build about a 16-ft square pergola over that area to help with the sun. The back of the house faces south-east so it gets a lot of morning to afternoon sun.
   
3. Essentially same view as the one above but pulled back to show one of the side beds. The lighter green grass is all new (and thirsty!). You can see how the yard slopes down in this shot.
   
4. View down the length of the back bed. This bed is somewhere between 70 and 75 feet long. You can see some tiny colored flags and a line of dead grass out in front of the bed. that's where one of the sprinkler lines was put in. The area in front of this bed (to the left in the picture) gets swampy when we get our normal heavy spring rains. We're planning to put in a dry creek bed meandering through there to hold the water and break up things a bit.
   
5. Not a very good shot but this is, obviously, looking back at the house and patio from out in the hard. Perspective is odd because I'm down at the bottom of the slope looking up.
   

Beginning of the Big Yard Project

We've finally admitted that the work to be done in the back yard is beyond our time and muscles.

Hired a landscaper to come in and do some serious grunt work and build beds. First step was Saturday June 6th. She marked the bed locations and sprayed gallons of Round Up on the Bermuda grass that needs to be killed off for regrading and/or resodding.

The marking is so that the guy coming in a couple of days to put in a sprinkler system in a couple of days will know where to put 'em.

Wow, guess I missed May entirely

Without any business travel to speak of, my life is pretty mundane. The month of May slipped by without anything interesting enough to even write about.

I did get a business trip to Pleasanton in Northern California last week but it was work, work, work. Ten to twelve hour days, dinner, bed, and do it all over again.

Refinished the front door

Not very exciting except that now I don't have to look at the deteriorated front door any longer. The house we moved into about three years ago has a nice wood door with leaded glass. But it looked like it had never been cared for in any way. And it's fairly exposed. No significant overhang to protect it and faces mostly west so it catches a lot of weather straight on.

I didn't think to get any good "before" pictures. The top shot is, obviously, the door in progress but well along. My neighbor Paul helped me with this project. We got it down and sanded it down to bare wood. Between three and four hours with an assortment of power sanders, sanding sponges, and plain ol' hand sanding. There was some water damage along the bottom panel and the molding around the raised panels was a real mess.

We stained it, each working down one side, with a walnut stain that matched the original color fairly well and looks good with the brick. Then I put on two coats of satin polyurethane.

With drying time for everything that took most of the day on Good Friday and all of Saturday. It really could have used a third coat of polyurethane but we had company coming over on Easter Sunday and it didn't seem like a good idea to leave up the OSB board that was screwed in place in the doorway. :)

The end result isn't perfect but it is so much better than it was.

The next generations out in the bluebonnets

Just a quick post. Been horrible about blogging. No time, no time! Aryn and Anna came to stay for the weekend this past weekend. A friend of ours let us know that the bluebonnets behind her house were in full bloom.

So we loaded everyone up along with Alice's DSLR. Here's what I think is the best of about 20 shots.

Sunny morning..

Walking into the living room on a bright sunny morning like today, I am struck by how much I like this house. We liked our previous home but the living room in that house was like a cave. This one has lots of windows and higher ceilings to give it a terrific bright, cheery feel.

Of course, it took a lot of imagination to see what it could be with the previous owner's ... decor (lower picture). White walls, whitish carpet, and not much imagination.

I've got to say that the previous owner probably wouldn't recognize the interior of the house.

The home office

Three reasons for this post:

1. Finally got pictures hung on the wall behind the computers
   
2. The room is about as picked up and clean as it ever gets
   
3. Might soon be my only office.
   

After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.

• Top left is a piece of aboriginal art from Australia purchased on my first trip to Sydney
  
• Top middle is a shot of the Eiffel Tower purchased in a little shop in Monte Martre on my second trip to Paris.
  
• Top right is a triptych of iconic Sydney sights purchased at a street market on my second trip to Sydney
  
• Bottom left is a panorama of the Seattle skyline purchased at a shop in Pike's Market on our Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle vacation trip.
  
• Bottom middle is a photo of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall of China. Not the section I visited, that was Mutianyu. Purchased from the photographer at a flea market in Beijing.
  
• Bottom right is a Paris skyline with one of the Notre Dame gargoyles in the foreground. Purchased at the same time as the other Paris picture.
  

The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.

And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.

Another project done: Laundry room tile

(Catching up on past events, however unexciting)

Before and after pics of the laundry room floor. It is so much better. Cruddy, worn vinyl and beat-up rusty drain pan all gone. And all the squeaks removed in the process.

As the long break I had at Christmas wore on, Alice reminded me: "If you let this vacation slide by you'll never have time to do the tile and you'll have to hire someone." When she's right, she's right.

This occupied all my free time from New Year's Eve until January 6th. Not a horrible job but my knees are getting too old for this. Kneepads, of course, but the straps on those damn things irritated the back of my knees almost as much as kneeling on hard floors did the front.

I did a lot better job of working this room so that I wasn't waiting for things to dry. When I did the hall bathroom back last January, I kept sort of tiling myself into a corner. I was able to work this back to front much better. I also planned and cut the "baseboard" tiles for this one at the beginning instead of as an afterthought. So those went in as I went along and not as a separate job after the floor was done. And the layout came out exactly as I intended with whole tiles at the exact planned spot at the doorway.

Anyway, that's three rooms floored upstairs. That leaves the two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, the hall, and the stairs still to go. Thinking of wood for the master bedroom, tile for the master bath, and new carpet for all the rest. As the budget allows.

It was odd after I got this done. Put away the tiling tools and leftover tile. I had the pile of tile boxes, morter mix, etc for this project all piled in the garage for barely short of a year.