Shell Lake Furniture produces some nice-looking, quality mission furniture, as well as a cabin collection and custom work. They have a furniture showroom and offer factory tours, too. Unfortunately, they are only open Monday through Friday, so there will be no furniture shopping for me today. In case you’d like to see what I missed, their website is open 24/7.

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The thing I love about a good local hardware store is that I know the people there well enough to trust their advice. When I walked into the store today, I trotted straight up to a clerk I recognized and said, “I have some bricks that need tuckpointing and I have never done this before. What do I need to do the job?”

The clerk probed a bit about the specifics of the situation and recommended a traditional sand and mortar mixture for filling the joints along with a trowel and tuckpointing tool. Hooray! New tools!

Rather than mix the mortar to a stiff consistency, the clerk suggested that I make the mortar mix more soupy so that it would be easier to force down into the deep cracks created by the stairs settling away from the house. This sounds like an excellent plan to me– in fact, I’m trying to think of some better ways to force the mortar deep into the gaps than just pressing it in with a piece of wood or a trowel. Some means of injection would really do the trick.

Whether I come up with any good ideas or not, I’ll try my hand at the tuckpointing during one of my toddler’s naps tomorrow.

UPDATE: Curse my insufficient research! I’m sure I that want to use a lime-based mortar because it will be more forgiving with the soft old bricks, but the materials I bought yesterday include portland cement. I’ll need to get back to the store to get some hydrated lime before attempting the repointing.

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• June 25, 2008 -- Defencing
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This is an unusual spot where a small deck is built over the top of the old back stairs and brick wing walls. Right against the deck and brick walls is a tall section of chain link fence that is now is used only as a trellis for the grapevine. I want to clear out the aggressive grapevine and replace the ugly and obsolete chain link fence with a wooden trellis that better integrates with the deck while concealing the unused old stairs.

Before the clematis can go in, the grapevine must come out, so I pulled out the vines and dug out as much of the roots as I could. This is what the spot looked like with the grapevine removed, and the fence, old steps and deck clearly visible:

Removing the fence proved surprisingly easy. First I unbolted the hardware holding the chain links to the posts and removed the fencing. With just the posts left, I dug down enough to wiggle loose the posts and their concrete footings. It felt awfully manly to pull those big concrete-coated posts out of the ground, though it was much less manly for me to stagger around like a drunk while struggling to wield the heavy, awkward things.

With the fence out of the way, I had great access to the old stairs and I immediately saw two problems that were going to complicate my plan to plant the clematis: grapevine roots that had penetrated the wing wall and a big gap at the corner that will require tuckpointing.

It looks like a partial repair may have been attempted at the top of the wall using concrete, but otherwise the tuckpointing problem had been well-concealed behind the old fence post. I have never tuckpointed before, so I’m looking forward to this opportunity to practice the skill on a low-risk area like the old back steps. As for the grapevine roots that have gone through the brick to who knows where, I’m going to have to use Roundup on any growth they produce and hope that is enough to finish off the last of the old vines.

When the old grapevine is gone and the mortar is mended, I will be able to build the trellis and (at last) plant the clematis.

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I only had time to make it to the first house on the tour, but it was a good one– a nearby bungalow with a contractor for an owner that had recently undergone a “GreenStar” remodeling project. This means that they employed some of the latest techniques to reduce the environmental impact of their renovation projects and the ongoing carbon footprint of their house.

Their completed project list read like my to-do list:

• Renovate the attic and improve energy performance with spray foam insulation
• Install a tankless water heater
• Build custom wainscot and chair rail for the dining room
• Restore missing light fixtures with antiques or reproductions
• Renew the exterior with fresh paint in period-appropriate colors

The homeowners did all this plus a kitchen remodel and more, and the results look fabulous. Most amazing to me was that all their extensive work was completed in just a few months. That’s something a weekender like me can’t hope to achieve, though I aspire to results as nice as theirs.

But don’t just take my word for it. The homeowners have provided a website of pictures from their remodeling project for your perusal.

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What makes this project special is that it was primarily accomplished by dividing mature plants from other areas of the landscaping and adding them to the vacant areas in the backyard. Free landscaping! Although Ms. Bungalow’s goal was to fix up the area without buying anything, we broke down and picked up a few sedum when we were out at the garden store.

Here is how the backyard berm looked a couple summers ago after I planted some spirea bushes:

And here is that same area after Ms. Bungalow added some divided hosta, sedum, and other plants:

You might notice that the spirea from the first picture haven’t actually done that well in this spot. This location probably gets more shade than the spirea would like, though Ms. Bungalow’s new additions should be better suited to the area. When the new plants get fully established in a season or two this spot will really look lush. All that remains for this cheapskate garden project is to top the berm with some free mulch from one of the park board’s tree trimming mulch piles.

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• June 25, 2008 -- Defencing
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Well, consider this from You: The Owners Manual (HarperResource, 2005) by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Oprah’s pet doctor, Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.:

Illness comes mainly from events that constantly stress you–even if they’re minor to other people–and do so for a prolonged period. One category of these stressors is Nagging Unfinished Tasks (NUTs). For example, the nagging stress of sitting on a wobbly toilet seat and never fixing it will age you, if it is one of those things that just gnaws at you every time you use it. …Nagging stress wears you out, while persistent stressors are true killers (p.93).

The idea in this passage that struck me isn’t necessarily the notion that a seat wobble can promote illness, but rather that the seat’s power to harm me is based on what I think about the seat.

Why should it matter what I think? I can get lead poisoning whether I happen to think lead is a threat or not. (It is– be safe, Dear Reader!) However, that wobbly toilet seat is harmful only to the people who perceive the wobbly seat as a bothersome problem, but through procrastination or competing priorities do nothing to fix it.

This is a heavy idea for a guy with a couple actual wobbly toilet seats and at least a dozen more metaphorical ones. Few are the family dinners in which my eyes don’t linger briefly on the bubbled surface of the painted wallpaper in the dining room while I think, “someday, all that nasty paper is coming down.” Lately it has gotten hard for me to look at the outside of the house without focusing on the peeling paint and thinking, “I’ve got to get to that this summer.” And when I put my 16-month-old son to sleep in his crib in my bedroom for yet another night because I’m still renovating his nursery, it’s hard not to ask myself, “When will I ever get that room done?”

Roizen and Oz would probably tell me that I need to either finish these and other nagging projects right away or find a way to release my feeling of obligation to them. That’s a tall order. I’m a long way from zen-like mental tranquility in the face of painted wallpaper, but I am trying to see the house more as a whole thing that I love rather than as a collection of parts I want to fix.

How do you keep you house projects in perspective?

Has an uncompleted house project ever made you sick? How did you respond?

Share your thoughts in the comments below. Who knows, maybe with enough encouraging ideas we’ll all manage to live long enough to see the day when we have no more house projects.

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That’s a word I don’t get to say or write often enough around here. At least not without conditions like “finished for today” or “finished part ‘x’ of much larger project ‘y’.” But today, I can say that the raised garden bed project is really completely finished.

In Part II of this story, the raised garden bed framing was in place, but it needed fencing, gates, soil work and plants. Over the Memorial Day weekend I found just enough time to complete all of these remaining items.

I used coated chicken wire for the fencing, which should last longer without rusting than the old uncoated wire I removed at the start of this project. I wish the green color of the wire didn’t clash so badly with the lumber, but it’s imperceptible at anything other than a raking angle or close examination.

For the gates, I had intended to build swinging wood framed doors, but instead I just installed a piece of the chicken wire at a lower “step over” height in the gate openings. I was already accustomed to stepping over the old garden fence, and eliminating the swinging gates allowed me to save a bit of money on lumber and hardware.

With the garden construction complete, I worked some composted manure and peat moss into the soil with my hand tiller, then planted my vegetables. Other than the lettuce, it looks pretty pathetic right now, but many items like the pole beans, carrots and beets are all just starting from seeds.

As a summary, here is a before and after comparison of the vegetable garden:

It feels good to be finished!

As pleased as I am with the garden, though, the real star of the backyard right now is the lilac hedge. It is in peak bloom and looks gorgeous draping the birdhouse arbor.

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Perhaps tonight I will get to attach the chicken wire to the fence rails and finish the soil prep. Then all that remains is to build the gates and plant (finally!) the veggies.

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I took on this project for two reasons: the corner posts were no longer strong enough to properly support the chicken wire pest fencing, and the soil level was mounding over the top of the raised garden bed. I want the fence to be stronger and better looking, and I want to add to the soil with composted manure; the garden bed couldn’t accomodate either of these as it was.

For this project I replaced the 2×2 fence posts with 4×4s and raised the bed walls with a new course of 2×6 boards. Because the fence posts only need to support some lightly stretched chicken wire, I chose to use short posts. Each is only 4 feet long, with approximately 8 inches below the level of the garden soil. These posts are supported mostly by the screws anchoring them to the upright boards of the garden wall but will be further strengthened when I add railing boards between the posts near their tops.

The new and old garden wall boards are screwed to the fence posts which will help hold the two courses of wall boards together. I also used construction adhesive on all contact surfaces of the garden wall boards to maintain a strong connection between the old and new walls of the raised bed. At the end I added decorative post finials to give the garden a finished look.

Still left to do on this project:

• Install the railing boards
• Stain the lumber
• String the chicken wire
• Add composted manure to enrich and raise the soil
• Plant the veggies!

I should have time to finish these remaining details this week.

As an aside, I was thrilled with using my new cordless drill on this project. Just as advertised, the lithium-ion battery ran strong through dozens of 3″ screws until it abruptly ran out of power near the end of the project. The drill performed the same on the second-to-last screw as it did on the first– a remarkable change in battery performance from the ni-cad battery powering my old drill. After 20 minutes in the charger while I cleaned up tools and debris, the drill was ready enough (on an incomplete charge) to drive the last few screws in the project.

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• May 28, 2008 -- Raising The Garden, Part III
• May 23, 2008 -- Raising The Garden, Part II
• June 11, 2008 -- Cheapskate Gardening: Addition By Division

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