Tree Planting

Exciting title, isn't it? But that's what we did this past weekend - we planted trees along the southern property line. There are already a few trees there - older maples and apple trees - but we wanted to fill it in a bit, both to define the property and to liven up the mostly bare landscape.

Driving home - and unloading them - were the best parts. :-)

And yes, I certainly did drive the skid-steer!

We chose Princeton Gold Norway maple, Jacquemontii birch, and two types of pear trees.

I'm the most excited about the maple trees. The employee at the garden centre told me that he has the same trees and the first year you hardly noticed them, but by the second year they were so striking that people were stopping their cars to take pictures. The leaves will be light green around the outside of the tree and bright chartreuse in the middle.

Tom pushed for the pear trees. They won't be edible pears, but the blossoms are so very pretty, and the leaves turn to purple in the fall. You can see a few are already changing.

Birch trees are my absolute favourite. We have quite a bit of old growth birch at the back of our property and I just love walking through it in the winter. We chose a variation that has very white bark right from the start. I can't wait to see how they look in a few years.

We also bought a white hydrangea for the front yard. We're going to relocate the beech tree near the road to add some white to the abundance of burgundy (cherry trees, another beech tree, and the smoke bush) we already have.

Hiding Downspout Extensions (aka Cutting the Grass w/o Swearing)

So this is kind of exciting. Tom has volunteered to write a blog post about his solution for our eavestrough downspouts and downspout extensions that are always in the way. I'm just going to sit back with my iced tea and let him tell you all about it....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hey there, it's Tom. Normally I’m just the guy behind the scenes - hammering things together or figuring out a way to “improve” something - for a whole lot of extra cost and effort. Barb probably thinks I'm just trying to avoid housework by always having a project on the go. Barb might be right.

Today though, I'm going to share a little story about eavestroughs. Our house is built on a steep hill - which might have drainage advantages, but sucks for lawn cutting. The 4WD tractor can climb the hill as I cut, but I can't really turn and slalom around obstacles on said hill - without tipping over, that is. And we have a wide variety of obstacles to maneuver around - tree stumps and rocks and downspouts (oh, my). Tree stumps and rocks can be removed, but I kind of need to get rainwater away from the foundation, so I’m going to have to keep the downspouts.

Right now it takes about three passes with the tractor to cut around them properly. I could use a push mower, but that adds a good hour to the job each week, and it’s not my favourite job as it is. After a couple of months of battling the pipes, I felt it was worth the effort to bury them. There is a lot of work involved to do this, so you'll want to make sure the benefits outweigh the costs, e.g. if you’re on a flat lot you don’t have gravity pulling the water away and will have to dig up a large area to make a drainage bed, plus you have to worry about water sitting in the pipes and freezing.

So now that we’ve decided it’s worth doing, what to do? It’s really pretty simple. There are two downspouts on the north side of our house, one at each corner. I started by cutting off about 4-5 feet from the bottom of each. The bottom portion is then replaced with 4" PVC sewer pipe.

This new pipe is large enough to slide right over the existing downspout. Bonus points for it being light and easy to work with as my usual helper went off to Nashville for an extended weekend, and the 2 spares really sucked at holding the pipes steady.

I next ran a pipe from the front downspout, nearly horizontally along the side of the house - keeping the bottom end a little lower than the top ensures that the water will keep flowing - and joined it up with the back one.

Before permanently attaching your pipes together you’ll want to lay out everything, cutting and dry-fitting all of your pieces together, making sure they run where you want them to. Keep extra pipe and pipe joints on hand because you never know what will go wrong change.

With the two downspouts joined together we can move on to running the pipe downhill. Since it's underground, that means digging a trench to bury the pipe. This trench will lead from the downspouts, down the hill to where the pipes split (more on that below), and then to a ditch that our neighbour dug specifically for water runoff in the bush that separates our properties. Be careful where you go with your runoff as you don't want to flood the house next door and have your neighbours mad at you.

We were lucky enough that the neighbor who dug the ditch in the bush was willing to come over with his excavator and dig the trench for us. I would have rented one to do it myself if he wasn't around, but there was no way I was digging it by hand. If you do decide to dig it with a shovel you can throw away your gym membership - you won't need it anymore.

Although I only have one pipe coming down the hill I put in Y fittings at the bottom to allow several branches for outlets (with one zigzagging around a stump and a rock).

There are a few reasons for this:

1) Critters. If it doesn't rain for a bit, animals may decide to build a home at the end of a pipe and block it.
2) Frozen pipes. If there is a mild thaw and there is runoff from the roof, it can dam up at the outlet mouth when it hits the colder ground. Each of the outlet pipes leaves the main pipe at a slightly different angle. Water will flow to the lowest one first. Then if it does refreeze at the mouth the other two pipes will still remain open.
3) Vegetation. The outlet runs into the bush and vegetation has this crazy habit of growing wherever it wants to, possibly over the mouth of a pipe.
4) The “duh” factor. I might forget the pipe is there and throw dirt over an outlet during my next project.

Any way you look at it, having extra outlets is cheap insurance to keep the water flowing.

If you don’t have a convenient forest next to your property and are bringing the outlets to an end in the middle of your yard, don’t fear, a quick Google search will lead you to a wide selection of grates or pop up valves to give a finished look to the pipe. Be careful when using the pop up valves - if you live in the south they are wonderful, but if you contend with winter they can freeze in place. You may want to buy the type you can remove in the fall then put them back in place for spring and summer.

Once all the pieces are in place they are glued together with PVC cement. This is where your previous dry-fitting comes in as the cement dries very quickly and you don’t have a lot of time to play around. Apply the cement to both surfaces of the join to ensure a good seal.

The only thing left to do now is bury the pipe.  At the bottom of the hill I was able to use the skid steer to move the dirt back into place, but on the hill it was just easier to do it by hand.

Now with the trench filled back in I can seed the ground, and eventually you won’t even know the pipe is there. Then I can go back to mowing the grass. And my next important project. Or I could clean the bathroom. Nah, it’ll probably be a project.

One Final Tour of Our Old House (with Before & Afters)

We've been in our new house for a month now. With the combination of Christmas and snowstorms and all those daily, little chores that steal away your time, we haven't done more than a few superficial repairs and changes so far - things like installing some temporary strip lighting in the closet (instead of using a flashlight to find matching clothes in the morning) and putting up a shelter to keep the snow off my precious car.

It's difficult not to compare this new house with our last one - we had spent seven years making changes and improvements, making it ours. Just like a fitness journey, "You can't compare your beginning to someone else's middle", I have to keep reminding myself that the new house will be beautiful some day and the joy is in getting it there.

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to take one last look at our old house, the before & after, and highlight some of our favourite projects.

When we moved in, the house was mostly decorated in green, yellow, and orange. We thought it was perfect and didn't change a thing. It took about two years before it started feeling a little too Southwestern for our tastes. We slowly brought in some neutrals, starting with the living room and foyer.

Before:

After (BM Ranchwood):

Once you change the walls though, suddenly your kitchen cabinets no longer match. I'd originally planned to strip the green and stain them a dark brown, but in the end went with a clean white. It instantly lightened up the whole room, especially since there was no window to bring in extra light.

We also added undercounter lighting (touchless!), and changed out all of the appliances. We kept the terracotta-coloured tiles and I think they go just as well with taupe and white as they did with yellow and green.

Before:

After:

Upstairs, the front room was our "computer room", aka the office. It had a huge bay window and received the most sunshine of the whole house. It was the dogs' favourite hangout for sure. We changed it from a deep cranberry to a light blue, and accented with white picture frames and a grey loveseat.

Before:

After (BM Nimbus Grey):

The custom-made glass front bookcases have been with me for over 15 years - from my apartment in Toronto to three houses now - I'll never let them go.

We turned one of the bedrooms into a craft room. It really became an everything room - gift wrapping, sewing, photography studio, and crafting of course. It started out midnight blue with little stars stickers all over the walls. Big change!

Before:

After:

My favourite (I say that a lot) project in here is the wrapping paper and ribbon station. Tom and I designed it together using ideas we saw online and then tweaking it along the way until we had what worked for us. It was wonderful having all of my wrapping supplies right on hand whenever I needed them.

The guest room was the first room I painted here. It started out as a bright, bright yellow. I painted it one weekend while Tom was away. He didn't even notice it had changed until I told him about a month later. I just went to the paint store and grabbed a colour that I liked. I didn't like it for long but never got around to changing it either. So this room ended up being a mishmash of leftover decorating items. We even stored all of our extra artwork under the bed! It does contain my first piece of refinished furniture though - the  stained & waxed dresser from Goodwill. This is when I fell in love with finishing a piece with furniture wax instead of polyurethane.

Smaller projects were the main bathroom, the powder room, and the linen closet in the upstairs hallway. In the main bathroom, beyond paint, we replaced the medicine cabinet and mirror with custom-made pieces we did ourselves. Tom has become an old hand at building mirror frames. The ones in the powder room and ensuite were built by him as well.

The linen closet received all new shelving, a more streamlined laundry chute (I miss that so much!), and framed bi-fold doors. We also framed out and added bi-fold doors to the front foyer coat closet.

Before:

After:

The two biggest changes upstairs were the master bedroom and the ensuite bathroom. The top half of the bedroom walls were done in a textured plaster with a brown glaze over yellow paint. I wasn't a fan, but I thought it would be too much work to scrape it all down and repair the walls. So I just painted it all one colour - first a dark grey (BM Arctic Seal) that was way too dark (think prison cell) - and then a lighter grey that was much more soothing.

Before:

1st Change (BM Stormy Monday):

I got a hankering for more though, so I installed faux board and batten wainscoting all around the bottom half of the room. This project was all mine. I learned so much about using different power tools that week. And my body paid the price for all that crawling around on the floor. There's something I adore about grey and white together. The room felt like a suite at a fancy hotel. One covered in dog hair of course.

After (BM Stormy Monday):

The ensuite bathroom was our pride and joy. It was a complete gut, right down to the studs. We even had to replace some studs because they were warped and weren't even connected to the drywall! We painstakingly chose all of the finishes, even driving to another town to get more tile when our local store ran out just as it was almost finished. We had the tile installed by a contractor as we knew it would take us months of evening and weekend work to get it done.

Before:

After:

Tom rerouted all of the plumbing himself so that we could have a wall-hung vanity. He also framed out the shower niche, built the mirror frame and shelves, and of course designed and built the inset toilet paper holder that he is so proud of.

The ensuite in our new house is a bit of a blank slate. We'll probably incorporate some of the same ideas - wood grain floor tile, inset toilet paper holder (as if that was in question!), wall-hung vanity - and we're going to have a go at doing it all ourselves. Cross your fingers for us!

The basement was fully finished when we moved in so there wasn't a lot to do. We rearranged some things like the washer/dryer and water heater, and installed a water softener, but most of the changes were cosmetic. We painted the entire basement a warm blue as we were going for a cottage/beachy feel. We changed out all of the lighting, hung some "beachy" artwork, and I painted a huge pallet sign. It's an homage to our favourite beach rental in Hawaii.

Before:

After:

We turned the cold storage into a regular storage area (it was still pretty cold) with wood paneled walls and strong wooden shelves. I always loved the smell of that room - I think I'm a carpenter at heart.

The backyard also got an overhaul. The house came with a tiny, tiny deck, actually two tiny decks attached to each other, but not on the same level. We raised up the second deck, enlarged it, and then added another lower deck off to the side where we hung our hammock. The plain wooden rail pickets were replaced with metal balusters.

The final project was to enclose the bottom of the deck, something we did just a month or so before we listed the house. It's too bad we didn't do it sooner as it really added to the appeal.

Before:

After:

Whew! That was a lot of change. We loved renovating this house. We made a few changes to our previous house (beyond paint), but this one was where we really got our groove on. I'm really going to miss it.

Here are a few more photos from the real estate listing that show it off like a model home.

(All real estate photos courtesy of West Blue Studio Services)