Category Archives: House

Last summer, I optimistically planted a yellow rose bush. Yellow roses are notoriously fragile plants. They just don’t like Vermont winters very much. But we’d had at least one hardy yellow rose bush back before we moved the house (it was of the climbing rose variety), so I really expected this new one to survive just fine. I didn’t bother to protect it with hay or fabric or anything. I just let winter come and cover it with snow.

When the snow melted, this poor plant looked dismal. Many of its branches were black/brown, and, while the other rose bushes and the lilacs brazenly showed off fresh buds at least a couple weeks ago, the yellow rose just looked dead. I examined its branches every day when I set out for a walk and saw nothing fresh and green about it.

A few days ago, though, I spotted the first buds. Just a few, and only on the lower green stems (maybe those were sheltered better by the snow drifts early on?). This morning, I cut off all the brown parts. The bush now looks kind of sad, and stunted, but it has buds:

It has leaves!

And it has all summer to be coddled by me.

And, by golly, you can bet I’m putting a parka around it next fall.

This posting is a long time coming – not only because the major landscaping work was done in April and I’m only now posting the photos, but because we didn’t get to the landscaping until two years after we moved back into the house. What was our hurry?

One of the hard things about moving the house was having to stop gardening for the last few years, first because it made no sense to plant anything when the whole yard was going to be leveled, and then because it made no sense to plant anything before we were able to have someone come in and smooth everything off and put down some real soil. For those of you not in New England, real soil = soil without rocks. Because we grow some nice big rocks here, particularly, it seems, in our gardens.

One of the wonderful things about moving the house is that we got a blank slate. A more level, gently sloping, freshly seeded blank slate. And once the final scraping, leveling, and soil dumping happened this spring, we hopped right on to planting. Ok, the house still looks a bit like a 200-year-old house that got beamed down into a new housing development – pretty spare in terms of perennials around the house – but we’ve planted several things and over the next few years, they might even grow BIG.

Here are a few before and after photos so you can see the changes. Note: The before pictures look even more pitiful because they were taken in early spring, just after the snow melted, in Vermont’s ugliest season, so try not to be too hard on them.

Here’s how things looked in late April in the side yard:

and the back yard:

If you look at the large view of that photo, you can make out all the hillocks, ankle-twisting depressions, piles of rubble and rock, and the leftover beams, of course. Oh wait, are those the remnants of the Christmas tree I see by the deck steps? Of course. Once again, what’s the hurry?

Oh, and off to the side is Hyla’s poor little play house, which was moved out of the way for the house move and never moved back to a level spot:

Then one day, this appeared on our property, and things began to change:

You’d think by now we’d be used to seeing big yellow machinery hanging around the place, but it’s exciting every time, especially when it means we might have a vegetable garden again.

In a nutshell, the machines arrived, the men dug out the bad bumps and rocks, dumped loads of top soil, smoothed it all over, moved the play house to a new level spot, spread grass seed, and then put down mulch hay to protect the seed.

Here’s how things are looking nowadays:

I don’t have a good picture yet of the front of the house, so I’ll take one this weekend and post that soon.

If you want to wade through all of the landcaping pictures, you can see the flickr photo set here.

Progress on the house has been slow. There are just so many other things to keep one busy, like working, sleeping, and eating.

But Michael has recently been plugging away at the little things, the things that take a few minutes here and there, or a few hours every night for weeks; things that accumulate into some much-needed changes.

The biggest project like this that he’s tackled is the Great Basement Cleanup. Ever since we moved in, the basement has been a mess. I guess that’s what basements are for and, since we never really had one before, we reveled in having a clean, dry basement where we could dump things and forget about them for a long, long time. Trouble is, we were losing thing down there, and were having trouble walking around, or giving the furnace guy access to the oil tank filter.

And then there was the need to have a workshop. A place to use all the cool tools we have but have been packed away for two years. What’s the point of having a basement if you can’t make sawdust in it?

So, several weeks ago, Michael started organizing the basement. He opened long-forgotten boxes, made many trips to the recycling center, pulled out mountains of old kid clothes and other things for donation (which Hyla and I dropped off at the local donation dropoff), put peg boards up, hung tools on the pegboards, unpacked various nuts and bolts and washers and hooks and screws and other tiny pieces of metal AND organized them. And now we have the beginnings of a workshop:

The boards you see on the floor there are for the first project that will come out of this workshop: a set of built-in shelves that will run the length of a wall in Hyla’s room and will give us a place to put all the toys we removed from the basement (organizing a house seems to be circular this way).

Mmmmm… so many tools:

The basement cleanup project became infectious, so it also became the office cleanup project. The office is not what I’d call completely clean, but it is reorganized so that I get a view out the window:

And, in particular, I now have a view of this beautiful hummingbird feeder that my friend, Carole, gave me:

Putting up that bird feeder led to putting up the other feeders, including the hummingbird feeder outside the kitchen window:

We also have a feeder with sunflower seeds in it on the deck that was host to cardinals, finches, grosbeaks, titmice, nuthatches, chickadees and the like, but the squirrels have decided it belongs to them and only them, so we’ve moved it to a new location and I have yet to take a picture of that. As of yesterday, the birds seem to have found the new location.

Also while cleaning the basement, Michael hauled up all of the as-yet unhung pictures and started putting those up around the house. We have framed artwork up on the second floor, and now, after more than a year of living in the house, we have a bathroom mirror in the upstairs bathroom:

And, finally, our friendly door snake is back where he belongs, proclaiming “Eat Good Food, Be Kind, Tell the Truth”:

All that from cleaning the basement.

It just wouldn’t feel right to end the year without seeing some heavy machinery one more time.

This week, we had a crew come in to finally fix the driveway, which was left in a rather pitiful state in the spring, and only got worse as the rains came — and came — and dug significant canyons in the gravel.

First, the little “Mustang” came and scraped down the existing driveway to level it off:

Next was a delivery of dirt to refill one area that had nearly washed away in this summer’s rains:

That was smoothed and packed down, and then came the loads of new gravel:

The little mustang scraper did a costume change, put on its roller attachment, and traveled up and down the driveway, packing the new gravel down:

And now we have the smoothest driveway in Vermont (until the spring rains, of course):

We haven’t been doing a lot of painting around here lately, but we have been buying and assembling furniture.

Last Tuesday evening (the day before Thanksgiving guests were to arrive), a new bookcase was delivered. It felt like Christmas eve, with the two of us hurridly assembling the bicycle… ahem… bookcase before bed time. Then Michael spent the rest of the night unboxing the books that have been stored away for more than a year.

The addition of this new bookcase makes it possible for us to have nearly every book we own out of boxes for the first time in our married life. (Well, we still have about four boxes of books to put out, but we’re pretty sure we can find four boxes of books to sell or donate…)

We had also planned for the Sofa Fairies to make a delivery just before Thanksgiving, but the delivery was delayed, and it worked out ok because it turned out we needed all the space in the ell living room for dining room tables for Thanksgiving dinner anyway. The sofa was due yesterday, so by Sunday night, we had its space ready:

And the Fairies appeared yesterday around 3:00 pm with this comfy nest:

Soon after, it was occupied by this little imp:

Somehow I don’t think she’s ever going to give up that corner.

During the house move (more than a year ago!), one of the windows in the dining room broke. We couldn’t tell it was broken until after we moved in and tried to use it, and then discovered that if you opened it, the whole thing fell apart in your hands. We put it back together, with strict orders to ourselves and everyone else to NEVER TOUCH THE WINDOW.

So we had that on the list, plus two or three minor other little things, and yesterday McKernon returned for one last time to replace that window and finish the remaining items on the “punchlist”.

First, they removed the broken window:

and then they installed this spiffy replacement:

The new window is the same style as the old windows in the house. That is, they don’t match all the new windows in the ell and kitchen, but it matches its sibling right next to it. More importantly, the “old” style of window is the kind that tilts in for cleaning, and since it’s a long drop on the outside of this window to the ground below, this type of window might actually get cleaned from time to time.

The new window was the biggest project, but the guys also finished a couple other important things, like replacing some broken clapboards beneath those two dining room windows, and filling in the last of the remaining holes that were made for stringing cables through the house for the move.

With a successful Thanksgiving behind (two bathrooms really do make a difference, my friends), and these last McKernon tasks complete, it’s starting to feel like we’re really home.