Hedge Hogs

Have I mentioned before that we have the nicest, sweetest neighbor in the whole world?

He's really wonderful, and we're lucky to have him. He lets us borrow things, helps us out, and is just a nice guy. His family's nice, too. Anyway, our driveway goes along the portion of the private road that's in front of his house, and the pavement has crumbled over time. So when we were talking about a hedge, he was very supportive, and even went halfsies on the plants with us. He's been doing a bit of work here and there, and was going to finish up on Sunday whatever we didn't get done, but we got a hair up our butts and went nuts. We just finished the whole thing. ^_^ So our nice neighbor felt sort of bad he didn't do more work on it, just because he's so nice. It was fine - we really were the ones that hogged the hedge. In reality, it's we who are grateful to him for helping us out when it's not his driveway being beautified.

Anyhoo, I had been shoveling dirt after work last week, and this weekend we finished it off. I want to say we ended up putting in 8 or 10 yards of topsoil or so, and then we planted every single plant. We ended up with six extra, but some were scrawny and so we planted those a little more closely together. You can't really tell, in my opinion.

So here's the photo bonanza. We think it turned out very, very nice, and we've already gotten comments from some other neighbors (who are also really great folks) on how good it looks. It's so nice to actually see some progress made on the house. We feel really great about our new hedge.

Stonewalling

Before I get into our hedge and the wall, I wanted to post a pic of the rot in our laundry room. The rot discovery and the water coming out of the ceiling happened over Memorial Day weekend, just to anchor it in time a bit better than my last post.

Appetizing, eh?

Okay, now back to the wall. We got the first batch of bricks back in May, and in preparation pulled out the reflectors and t-post at the end of the driveway so we could prep the area, such as dig out some of the driveway gravel where the planting bed would be. It was a rainy Sunday, and so as soon as we got the bricks unloaded, we went inside. We came out a half hour later only to find that someone had already driven over the strip between the private road and our driveway! In case you don't recall, this is where the French drain we put in last fall goes, and if someone drives over it, it can get crushed. We were pretty pissed that within minutes of pulling out the stake, someone drove over it. So, we had to put bricks down in the pouring rain. Fun.

We did it, though, and over the week after Memorial Day, we finished it off. It looked surprisingly nice. Here's the view from the street (where the post stands is where the car drove over when we pulled the post out).

And here's the view from our house, when the wall is not quite complete.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures of the completed project!

Whew

Well, what a whirlwind month that was!

We were busy trying to make our house livable for my family while they were here for my mom's surgery, and she was with us for a few weeks after that, so that's what we've been up to.

Now that my school's over, we're settled into our jobs, and everything looks to settle down until the streams of family come visit in July and August, we're trying to get stuff done on the ol' rat hole once more.

We ended up catching the possum in a large live trap, and took care of it for several days. Turns out it really liked to eat grapes, apples, and, of course, cat food (both dry and wet). I thought it was adorable, but my brother was of the opinion that it was horrible. *shrug* Anyway, we sprayed antibacterial stuff on its wound while we had it, gave it lots of food and water, and it seemed to be doing pretty well. There's a place here called PAWS (Progressive Animal Welfare Society or something like that - paws.org) that accepts wildlife, rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild. We took the possum there, and we hope they were able to help it get better and now it's happily building leaf nests somewhere.

Shortly after the possum was trapped, my trusty spouse went under the house to see what the damage was. That's when he found the leaf nest the possum had made in our plumbing, and he fixed the hole where it had entered. Our crawl space should now be secure. Anyway, while he was under there, he noticed that one corner of the house (the northwestern corner, the one under the laundry room-cum-entryway that has the car jack holding up the floor joist) had rotten wood and mold growing.

Now, I had been smelling something moldy in the laundry room for a while, especially once it got warm, but my spouse assured me it was just crappy, torn-apart old house smell. I didn't really investigate further. Once he went under the house, though, it was pretty obvious that the copious amounts of rot and mold were what was causing the smell. So, we moved the washer and dryer, opened up the wall, and ta-daaa! There was plumbing. Cracked, leaking plumbing. Turns out the laundry plumbing wasn't where we thought it was, and at some point in time (probably this winter) it had frozen and cracked. There was no insulation in the wall, which contributed. So we need to tear apart the laundry room this summer instead of the kitchen. I was so looking forward to having a kitchen...but oh well. We'll be able to reconfigure that room to make it more of an actual entry to our house, which will be nice. We'll also be able to widen what's now the front door, which will be VERY nice.

Once we figured out the plumbing was cracked, we immediately shut off the water and ran some new pex line. Since we're redoing the laundry room now anyway, we simply drilled holes in the ceiling and ran the plumbing down. We'll redo it nicely later on. Anyway, we had to use compression fittings to get the pex and the old galvanized to fit together. I was happy because I could do my laundry in hot water for the first time in a long time. I did several loads, and then, right before bed, we hear this odd sound.

The sound was water pouring down out of our ceiling. Turns out the compression fitting had let loose in the hot water (after time, apparently). So my spouse hurried into the attic as I ran to shut off the water, and we spent a good amount of time shoveling wet insulation/rat poison/nasty other bits into trash bags. The smell was AWFUL, and bags of wet insulation are very hard to carry. Plus Spouse found a mouse skeleton (intact, dessicated from poison), which was gross. We got everything cleaned up, and we haven't used hot water since. No lasting damage was done, as far as we can tell, and we'll find out for sure when we rip the whole thing out.

Other than that, we've been busy building the little strip for our hedge. We have the wall built and plan on finishing up this weekend with the dirt. We'll plant next week.

Stay tuned until then for pictures! Now that summer's here, we plan to have a lot more posts and get a lot more done.

To finish up, we got our official property value notice in the mail for our taxes due in 2008. The value of our property actually went up. I'm sure it's based on some other factors, like comparable sales, market conditions, etc., because it's pretty dark obvious that they haven't seen the place!