Brooke here: Thanksgiving looms. Thanksgiving looms large. We had two major projects to finish before family arrives. The first was the small bathroom, and the second was the landing between the primary fence posts. The weather was lovely last week, so we flipped these and went after the landing first. Let me put up a […]
Brooke here. Three things: First, we have discovered that when the previous owners said they had installed “French drains,” they did not actually mean “French drains.” They meant “plastic pipes covered in rocks ‘n crap and dumped on top of the ground.” We could not for the life of us understand why we still had […]
Brooke here: A quick post as we look for things to hurl… After last week’s discovery that we didn’t so much as have drains as we had stacks of plastic tubes and rocks, this morning Brown went around the rest of the property and yanked back the ivy to check whether the rest of the […]
Brooke here: Mike Holmes has probably reached a point in his career where he can walk into a room infested with flaming baby vampires, casually evaluate the corollary property damage caused by the fire, and make the call to the Canadian contractor who specializes in flaming baby vampire removal, all without batting a muscular eyelid. […]
Brooke here: It’s not. Weeding isn’t sexy. Sexy in the sensationalism way, I mean; who am I to judge if your fantasy world involves killing dandelions? But it’s not fake-sexy, it’s really not fake-sexy, and neither is housecleaning or raking or leaf-blowing or any of the hundreds of maintenance tasks that you have to do […]
Brooke here: When ripping up the earth for the Vestigial Lawn, I kept finding scraps of some sort of tile. Here are three of the largest pieces: These differ from brick, obviously, and my best guess is that someone disposed of a pile of … somethings. I originally thought these might have come from an […]
Brooke here: Right before the cops showed up — (Which is a rather boring story about Brown and Steve photographing flowers with the homeowner’s permission and a paranoid neighbor calling the police on them, but when you get the opportunity to start a post with “right before the cops showed up,” you use it.) — […]
Brooke here: Mid-July and August set records on heat and general Oh God, so we called time out on the yardwork. I would have posted status updates but most of it would literally have been about watching grass grow, so let’s jump ahead to the end result. Click on the pictures for a better comparison: […]
Brooke here: The pool is aaaalmost done. We’ve (well, Brown, since these things weigh about 150lbs each) positioned the concrete planters from the last post along the two far sides of the pool. The planters have been filled with some disgustingly cheap annuals. Why the far side of the pool, you ask? And what’s that […]
Brooke here: Pool and fence projects are coming along well. I’ve actually been swimming in the pool, although mostly to haul a sump down to the bottom to blow the pipes clean (perhaps a mistake: it was fresh water and the pool company had overshocked it with chlorine, so I spent the rest of the […]
Flying by night 