...End Intermission

So we've had the "technical difficulties" post up for the past couple of months, but we really can't blame all of our inactivity on that.  I wish I could say that we've just been doing so much on the house that we've been too exhausted to post, but that has not been the case.   In reality, we just haven't gotten very much done - so there hasn't been much to tell.  There have been a number of reasons for this - beginning with one crazy Memorial Day weekend (the week before our old laptop kicked the bucket).

We made a little discovery on Memorial Day -  we have wallpaper in the dining room and parlor.  How did we discover this?  - you might ask...by removing the switch-plates in preparation for painting, naturally.  Tom unscrewed the switch-plate in the dining room and, instead of popping off, it ripped off with a three-foot long section of wallpaper.  That is how the day that Tom and I were finally going to start priming the downstairs of our house with our good friend Dave turned into a day of scraping wallpaper instead.  Queue intermission music (and put it on repeat).

The silver lining to finding the wallpaper is that the 'roman bathouse' look that part of the first floor of our house has taken is a decided improvement over brown paint.  That is, in addition to the reality that peeling 80-ish year old wallpaper off can be remarkably satisfying (sometimes).  Unfortunately, this peeling project is still underway over three months later (it's only two rooms - it shouldn't take this long).  Thankfully, it has picked up in the last month.

What you can see here is about a third of what we got scraped over the course of three months:

There were some things that slowed us down, though.  A big one was the heat.  The week surrounding the 4th of July was when the first heat wave hit and, coincidentally, when we got our first major house guests - our sister-in-law and three rambunctious boys - and two much smaller, furry longer term guests - their cats Jack and Maya.  As you can see below, we had a great time with them...

(This is the intermission in the blog post that is probably properly proportioned to the one we took this summer from working on our house)

We soaked up the air conditioning at the Franklin Institute while Andrew was still here (unfortunately, I don't have any pictures).

We hit up the local kiddie pool (free - at the park right around the corner - awesome!):

I had to put this in because it is so stinking cute.

We went to the playground:

and, on the 4th, we joined in the festivities at our local fire station around the corner.  We joined the parade for about twenty feet,

then pulled over to watch all of the fire trucks from the nearby townships go by.  This is just a few of them, there had to have been 15-20 trucks and ambulances.  After our parade, all but a couple from our own fire house drove on to the next town over for the next parade.

After the parade, we hung out at the fire house and munched on soft pretzels, popcorn, hot dogs and other Philly delicacies.  The big finish for our neighborhood 4th of July celebration was this:

First came the candy,

then peanuts

They handed out candy and peanuts to the little kids to keep them from getting pelted (or trampled).

It was a fun morning, but it did get really hot.  When we got back, Tom took care of that (at least for the little guys).

(end intermission)

..... but those were the fun parts between sitting in our un-air conditioned house trying to move as little as possible because it was still 90 degrees and some insane percentage of humidity inside.  So, anyway, our first obstacle in getting very little done one our house this summer was the heat.

The other big thing that slowed us down for a while was my sheer exhaustion brought on by the little kiddo we have heading our way.  I knew I was really tired at the time, but it wasn't until I rolled into the second trimester and my energy came back over a one week period that I realized just how useless I had been.  We are extraordinarily excited about the little one who will be joining our family at the end of January - we just have a lot more work to do before then.

Sweaty, tired and happy the night we found out...

We have gotten more done since my energy returned, but we've had other things like a 2 week vacation, visits to and from family, a concert in Central Park to go to and fall weekend work commitments that have slowed us down (okay - most of those were our own doing and lots of fun).

We are on the verge, though. Serious progress is right around the corner (and this time, it's for real) : )

Technical difficulties

We had a bit of a set-back this past Saturday...our macbook's hard drive died on us.

Fortunately, Kathryn had backed-up all of our photos right before we moved and our music will be easy to recover.

Unfortunately, we did lose almost all of the pictures that we have been amassing since we moved in March.  Not a huge loss, but still a bit frustrating and sad (we are going to keep the dead drive on the off-chance that we decide to send it to a data-recovery firm).

The up-shot is that we can put a new hard drive into the laptop and re-load the disk image I made when it was bran'-spankin'-new four years ago.  Well, that and we are finally getting the 'second' computer that we have talked about for a long time.

So, please bear with us while we get our technological life back in order (we do have a couple of updates in the wings...they just won't be as pretty since we lost the pictures).

Baby Steps

I started writing this post two weeks ago.  It has kind of turned into a monster - sorry.

It feels like we haven't gotten much done in the past couple of weeks.  The amount of work we have ahead of us is kind of staggering at times and we go through phases of catatonic stupor because of being so overwhelmed.  It also seems as if we've really only had a few weekends to get good chunks of work done, let alone rest up from the week.  The Meadowbrook spring open house was a month ago so Tom worked that Saturday.  That Sunday we did have a really nice Reber family gathering with Tom's parents, his sister, Meg, and her husband, Josh.  Meg and Josh were visiting from Germany.  We are so glad they came to visit, though it was far too short!

The following weekend, Tom and I had a really fun, whirlwind trip out to State College for my brother's graduation from Penn State's MBA program.  Congratulations Andrew and Mindy for surviving two crazy years!

Two weeks ago Tom worked both days and this past weekend he was on Saturday.  He's on again this Saturday as well.

We do some stuff during the week, but it is hard to get into big projects with the small windows between work, dinner and bedtime.  Adding to the usual exhaustion of work has been Tom's frustrations with his job - being under-appreciated, under-compensated, overworked, being constantly pulled from his own work to fill gaps in the organization and then having people wonder why things in his own department aren't getting done -  it is really quite mind-boggling.  We're mentally and physically exhausted.

So we haven't done much - mostly baby steps and getting caught in the web of projects that need to precede the ones we really want done.  We really want to get the first floor painted - once we do that, we can decorate at least the parlor and set up bookshelves and unpack books, etc.  We can have at least one room that is basically complete.  Before we do that, however, we need to shuffle things around so that we can wash the walls and put down drop cloths.

A few weeks ago, we got a large number of boxes cleared out of the parlor and moved the filing cabinet upstairs.  Nothing flashy, but it was a big improvement.

       

We also got lumber so that we could build a free-standing lumber rack in the cellar.  The plan is to move the lumber out of the shop so we can move the workbench in from the dining room.  I was pretty useless on the lumber rack at first and Tom had very little time to work on it, so we got stalled on that for a little while.  I finally got over that and we've almost finished it a few times this past week.  We needed to get some more carriage bolts and install those and today, when I was putting in the bolts I remembered that we didn't have enough nuts - we need 8 more.   So close!

We moved this section outside to get it out of the way and discovered that we could do this - pretty cool!

It's going to hold a lot of lumber.

Our other accomplishments have mostly been outside.  We've begun to plant some of the things we've been acquiring - most have only been in the past few months, but there have been some long term snags.

In the front yard, we ripped out some of the landscape fabric on the front slope and got some lowbush blueberries and Comptonia (Sweet Fern) into the ground.

 

We planted an Ostrya (Hophornbeam) in the side yard

and a Lindera glauca var. salicifolia

Yes, Tom is pounding away on that root ball

  and a Quercus ilex (Holly Oak) up toward the front of our property.

   We still need to find homes for some highbush blueberries and more goodies we've acquired in the past few weeks.

We pulled a huge quantity of garlic mustard, attacked the roses, Robinia, grapevines, bittersweet and Clematis that have run rampant for the past couple of years.  A few weeks ago, I started digging in this mess.

 I discovered that there are some arborvitae along one of our fences.  One or two are alive, and some used to be.  

 This was only a 5-6 foot section of fence.  Almost all of it is just like that.  We'll be at this for a while.

We had been creating a brush pile at the back of our lot, but when I was working on this fence section, I decided that we weren't going to be able to process all of the waste coming out of our yard at this point.  After we have things cleaned up, sure, but we really don't want roses in our compost and vines are just annoying.  I headed out to the local library and picked up 15 30-gallon yard waste bags.  I filled four just with the pile from that first day and we've been adding to it ever since.  It has also managed to rain for the past two monday nights and I've been reluctant to move soggy bags out to the curb and risk having them just crumble so they're kind of piling up right now.

We also started tilling up a patch of grass in the sunniest part of the yard for our vegetable garden.  We got maybe half of it done last Saturday, but it has been too wet ever since to get back into it.  It is going to be maybe 12-15 x 20.  I decided that I was going to start tilling it while Tom was at work last Saturday - so on Friday night (after we popped the Direct TV satellite out of the ground) we marked out the corners.  Tom went inside to get something to mark it out with and what did he come out with? The blow torch.  Tom is really not your typical guy, except maybe when it comes to fire.  It didn't really work, so he ended up grabbing his axe and making some stakes instead, but it was pretty funny.

So that's about where we stand today--things have been rough lately, but we're still making progress and little by little we'll get there.  I just have to keep thinking of what I chanted to myself on those days during high school cross country practice when I was on a hill and just wanted to stop...flattening the hill, I'm flattening the hill.

Mechanical Advantage

It's been a while and I plan on getting caught up on this tomorrow, but here's something for today:

What happens when two horticulturists with climbing experience want to get an ugly Dish Network satellite dish out of their back yard?

You get this:

Mechanical Advantage.

Sling wrapped around the base of the satellite post, attached to a double micropulley system, tied into the closest tree.  Tom wasn't able to get up in the tree easily enough to tie it in up there so he used one of his lanyards with a steel snap, tossed it over the crotch, pulled up the pulley system and tied the end of his lanyard off down at the trunk.

Then we pulled.

Unfortunately, that mostly just brought the top of the tree to us.  

(Note - we wouldn't do this to a tree we actually cared about.  The only reason this one is still standing is because it's one of the tie-off points for our clothesline)

So we dug out more of the soil around the footer and tried again.

It was pretty clear that that was not helping.  So we dug some more.  

We were almost ready to give up, but I suggested that we try tying the system off at the trunk - more chance that we might just bend the pipe (which was already bent in another direction), but hey - what did we have to lose?   Plus it'd been a while since we'd had this much fun on a Friday evening.

So we did that and I pulled,

and pulled,

got a better grip and pulled again

and then it popped - ha!

Awesome!!

Close-ups of our system:

Then Tom decided to drag it so that it was vertical against the trunk. 

Now that was fun!!