Bouncing Marty

Well…its been a while. I don’t even know where to start. We had a great and low key holiday season at home, and it has rolled right into a nice Vegas spring. Adventures have been fairly limited and photo taking even more so. Combine that with fun and busy days and nights, and reporting gets pushed to the wayside.

We managed to spend the majority of our winter and spring weekends puttering around the house. The domestication levels have reached a new high at the Hindley Household. I’ll try to detail a couple projects that have been demanding attention as of late.

Last fall we tackled putting in some laminate flooring, which dramatically changed a lot of things about the house. Like a lot of projects we seem to get into, the majority of the work goes very quickly, but tying up the last loose ends takes an incredible amount of time and energy. To put the flooring in, we had to remove all the baseboards from the surrounding walls. They were typical track home style, very cheap painted fake-wood-stuff about 2″ tall. We replaced it with some fancy-shmancy 6″ boards that look a lot better. Below is a before/after in the kitchen. (Just after the boards were nailed up, not finished/painted yet.)

I was lucky enough to have a good friend who found a used compressor for me to have (Thanks Willie!!), and picked up a cheap finish nail gun to attach the boards with. Getting the baseboards up was fun and went fairly fast. I’m by no means a finish carpenter. I’m much more of a hack rip and tear kind of carpenter. Thank goodness for caulking and paint. I did a lot of fighting with our poor concrete, and wavy walls trying to keep the boards square and looking decent. It took two lazy Saturdays to get them up through the house, and we’re slowly working on finishing them. We pre-painted them in the garage with a sprayer (see below), and have been trying different various methods of finishing to see what works best. Its slow work…but we’ll get it done someday. Eventually we’ll repaint the caulking at the joints and nail holes, and do some touchup on the walls surrounding to finish up.

If you asked me what I thought of gardening two years ago, you would have gotten a response something like…”Gardening is for people who have nothing else to do.” Funny how things change. I spent a lot of time last winter doing this:

Just looking at that photo makes my back ache. When we bought our house, the backyard was basically a little patch of mostly dead grass surrounded by a concrete curb, with some dirt surrounding it covered in 3″ of pea gravel, and a plaster chicken in a birdbath.

And NOW…we have a kind of growing patch of grass surrounded by a bunch of bushes and trees and sprinklers and stuff and a plaster chicken in a birdbath.

Mollie has taken it upon herself to rid our backyard of all crabgrass, which is an incredible task. She’s weeded and feeded, she’s seeded, she’s ripped and pulled and watered. She’s removed large patches and replaced with sod. Quite the project. I think its going to pay off bigtime, our grass is starting to come in this spring nice and green.

Don’t let anyone fool you. Digging in the desert is awful. I can not believe the size and consistency of rocks in the soil here. We literally had to remove a truckload of white desert sandstone from our backyard that I pulled up to plant our trees and bushes.

We dug in a Modesto Ash, a Raywood Ash, and a Pink Dawn Chitalpa Multi-trunk in the backyard. We had to wait a good three months to see if our trees and plants were going to grow, and it looks like things are going to take. The above shot is the Modesto, and is turning more and more green each day. The other trees are not far behind, and its been surprisingly satisfying watching plants grow in our soil. Hard work paying off. Pretty fun.

We even have some flowers! We put in two large Chaste bushes, and Mollie put in a nice little Butterfly bush which is flowering nicely. Above is a Pineapple Guava. These hearty little guys grow well in the desert, and we planted ten of them around the yard to add some greenery to the block walls. Even they are growing in our spring sunshine. The red arrow above is pointing to a drip sprinkler head, which brings us to the final project we’ve been working on.

I hate our previous home owners. We keep discovering more and more poor workmanship in their home ‘projects’. Irritating. Above is the utility box for our backyard sprinklers. What a mess. I don’t want to get into much detail, but they did a lot of bad wiring and poor waterproofing, making working with our existing sprinklers a total pain. Well, after some frustration, I learned the ins and outs of sprinkler valves, PVC plumbing, digging trenches, and running drip lines. Now most all of our plants and trees have their own drippers to keep them alive when the heat comes on.

Its been a productive spring, and I think its going to pay off with a fun and relaxed summertime. Hopefully soon we’ll have some of our projects completed, and move onto bigger an better things.