Matching Tracksuits

There are two kinds of home improvement. One type amounts to little more than maintenance. It could hardly be called “home improvement” in fact; “home status quo” would be more appropriate. The second is the actual addition of value to the home.

This weekend’s project tackled the latter. More than simply adding value to our home (and the monetary value would be negligible), this weekend’s venture will add value to our lives in the form of fresh peppers, beans, and zucchini. We began our garden.

“Isn’t February a little early?” you ask. It certainly is for planting, but we weren’t planting. We were creating a bed for our coming lasagna garden.

There are many ways of creating a layered garden (hence the name “lasagna”), and many are “no dig” methods. We elected to go for the all-day, back-breaking, line-your-garden-with-timbers method.

Of course, this meant a lot of initial cutting, which was great, because I got to use some of the equipment Papa and Nan have been buying for me over the last two birthdays.

Still, in order to have a nice cut that didn’t go too far into the timber, I had to pull out the trusty reciprocating saw — the tool every homeowner should own — to finish it off.

K, being the surveyor that she is, wanted to line things out before digging. It was useful, to be sure, but I was simply planning on digging it out with timbers for reference.

We got a cute picture out of it, though.

The real work — the heavy lifting, to use a cliche — came next: the digging. Getting land level gave me a new appreciation for landscaping crews.

Once everything was level, the rest went fairly quickly. Driving ten inch spikes through three layers of landscaping timbers (though pre-drilled) aside, it was fairly pleasant work.

A little filling in the cracks and final digging — then we were ready for the first layer.

The idea of lasagna gardening is simple: layer leaves, compost, peat moss, and manure on a bed of paper (to keep out weeds, I believer) and simple plant. No tilling, no nothing.

Lacking newspapers, we used magazines. I’m hoping the glossy paper doesn’t have a detrimental effect. (No one Google it for me — ignorance is bliss.)

Whether or not the best method, it made for an interesting image

After the paper, we added our first layer: leaves. We’ll let it settle before adding the other layers.

In the end, I’m not sure what our neighbors found more amusing: laying out issues of Discover magazines or taking pictures of every step.

Where I grew up, we didn’t have many trees. There was a maple in the backyard that, by the time I was in high school, was of decent size, but otherwise, bare. It was one of those “modern” developments: raze everything and build houses.

Our house has a fair number of trees, and I’m fond of them all. Sure, it’s a mess in the autumn, but they provide oxygen, summer noise reduction, and shade. And they’re simply lovely. All trees.

Our neighbor, two houses down, doesn’t think so.

He apparently sees the annoyance factor, for this week he chopped down an enormous poplar that was in his front yard and cutting the heads off all his other trees.

To be fair, the poplar was leaning over his house, and that is the crux of the issue: protecting one’s home often takes precedence over nature. With lawnmowers, mouse traps, and chainsaws, we subdue our small square of land.

It’s how we mark our territory for other species. “Mine: stay out.”

The first gentleman came in, measured some windows, and then started talking about how great his windows were. Fun little demonstrations of how effective his windows were at stopping heat and such. Finally, the price: for our 1,300 square foot house, 14 windows total, with one of them a large picture window: $10,000. I’m rounding up here — it was nine something. I thought, “Wow — quite a bit more than I was expecting.”

The next fellow came in. Same deal. Why in the world did I not stop him earlier? “I know you’re going to show me all these wonderful ways your windows are going to save us money, but I just need a price.” It would have been so easy. Finally, a quote. This one was going to be big — I knew it. In fact, before K went up to give L her bath, I muttered in Polish, “It will be the same price as the other guy, or higher.” The gentleman wrote it on a piece of paper and slide it over to me. It was difficult to maintain composure.

$20,000.

Twenty grand to change fourteen windows. “We could remodel our kitchen and get a good bit done in one of the bathrooms for that,” I thought.

Finally, some simple, honest contractors came in. We ended up paying less than 25% of the highest bid. The results: K insists on keeping all the blinds up now.

An honest price.

Good quality work.

Guess who’ll get our business again?

How many nails does it take to hold a door in place?

Apparently only two, because when we ripped out this old door to put in a new one, we used a reciprocating saw only twice, for the two lonely nails on the knob side. The door was held in place, I’m assuming, by the generous application of caulk on the outside of the door. The caulk did double duty, though, for it not only secured the door but insulated the door, and it was a solo gig. Not a scrap of insulation between the door frame and the house; not a pin-point of insulating foam; not even a gratuitous bead of caulk.

No only that, but the door was essentially levitating.

It’s difficult to discern it in the picture, but that block of lumber looked as if it had been finished with a dull hatchet.

The whole thing was so poorly installed that if I’d sneezed when closing the door, I might have knocked the whole thing out, frame and all.

Not this one, though.

First major project of this weekend: the deck.

Before:

After cleaning and sanding:

Second major project: recovering from installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. “Within hours of its release, Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 for Windows XP began drawing hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their PCs” I later discovered (source). That was in May, and apparently it’s still not fixed.

A half-project of taking our Jetta in for a flat tire fix provides a striking contrast. “Imagine if everyone provided service like that,” I said to K. “We’d go to pick up our car and find someone in the shop had opened the hood and taken a sledgehammer to the engine: it would look the same, but would never work again.”

Yet another mind-numbing example of the “mystery” of the Microsoft monopoly: crappy products that rule the world.

The morning summer sun is actually merciful here — thanks, in part, to the forest we have in the backyard.

I now fully understand why plumbers charge the fees they do. I mean, if you had to go into strangers’ homes and deal with this stuff, wouldn’t you?

And this drain was only for our kitchen sink, dishwasher, and washing machine. Forty years’ of grime — not to mention what appears to be straight-out mud.

How do drains get this nasty?

Suffice it to say, it’s a good thing there is no way to digitize odors, because ladies and gentlemen, you would almost literally be up a particular creek…

We’re in the midst of re-doing (I hesitate to use the term “remodeling” since it’s such a small job) our closet.

Before:
After:

After — well, sort of after. The door frame width is a wonderfully-irregular 40 1/8 inches, so we’ll have to buy custom doors for it.

Forty and an eighth?! Where do they come up with sizes like that?