Sam-K.net

Cary and I built our raised garden this evening, erected on the same spot where last year’s garden attempt had failed miserably.   The garden walls were a cinch to set up, taking only about 2 minutes to build.   Clearing away the area and adding the dirt was the hardest part.  Grass had already overgrown the area, which I spent about 30 minutes or so clearing away.    It is at the point that I must give props to a very handy garden tool: the stirrup hoe.   It’s a tool of singular purpose with a bawdy name (but not as bawdy as it’s other common name, the hula hoe).  It made short work of the grass and weeds.   Pulling weeds is back-breaking work, but the stirrup hoe reduces the stress of the labor to back-bending.   It doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, but stripping a 4′ x 6′ area of weeds and grass in half an hour works for me.  Had we not just finished moving our old refrigerator into the garage earlier this evening, I might have cleared the spot in less time, but a body can only do so much.

So far, here’s what we have:

Will it yield actual food?  Time will tell.

Cary and I worked today on sprucing up the front yard.  Last night, we bought 50 landscaping bricks, 5 bags of mulch, a wheelbarrow/dumping cart thing, and a 4′ x 6′ raised garden kit.  Amazingly, we were able to cram all of this into the Honda Fit (it wasn’t the space that concerned me, but the weight.  The back end of the Fit was ridin’ pretty low on the drive home).

A few months ago, we had re-mulched the tree in our side yard.  The base of the tree was ringed with two levels of landscaping bricks.   At the same time, we mulched the area under the bushes in front of the house.  This area has started to be overtaken by grass and weeds, while the mulched area under tree in the side yard still looks good.   The landscaping bricks really make a good weed barrier.   So this morning, our first task was to pull weeds and line the mulched areas with them.  First, we tackled the bushes in front of the house:

We leveled the bricks pretty well, but they should settle a little more over time.

Next, we ringed the magnolia tree in the front yard with the same bricks:

Truth be told, this tree is looking quite pitiful:

We had originally bought enough bricks for just one layer, but a quick trip to Lowes later, and we had a second layer of bricks in place.  While I cut the grass in the back yard, Cary cut away a dying Azalea bush in front of the front walk.  There were originally three bushes here; we cut one of them away a year or so ago, and one of the remaining two bushes was all but dead.   Once the dead branches were cut away, I managed to get the trunk of the bush out of the ground with a sledgehammer.  Now, only one lonely bush remains:

The front yard is slowly coming under control.  We’ll continue with the back yard over the next week.

We finally managed to drain the pond in the back yard, pull out the liner and start filling it in with dirt.  Happy times.

Before (a view from the side of the pond, taken shortly after we moved in):

After (a view from the front of the pond):

There’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m just glad to have the thing gone.

One of the things that Cary didn’t like about our kitchen was the spice cabinet. We kept our spices in a narrow cabinet above the stove. The cabinet was rather deep, and had only three shelves. The problem with keeping small spice jars here was that the smaller jars were stacked on top of each other, multiple rows deep. So finding the right spice required pulling other spices out of the cabinet.

So as my first woodworking project, I thought I’d make a spice rack for Cary. Here are the plans I drew up in Google Sketchup after talking with Cary about what she wanted in a spice rack:

This is a pretty simple design consisting of two vertical pieces of 28.75″ x 3.5″ x 1/2″ wood sides and six shelves. The bottom two shelves are 3.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″, and the rest of the shelves area more shallow 2.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″. I also used 3/16″ diameter dowel rods as a sort of “lip” at the front of the shelves, just to keep stuff from sliding off. I’m not sure what kind of wood the dowel rods are made of, but the rest of the wood is poplar.

I decided to round off the top edges of the side pieces just to make the top of the rack a bit more interesting. Here’s a close-up of the half-way decent curve I made with a jigsaw and some preliminary sanding:

I planned to take more in-progress pictures, but I don’t think they would have been very interesting. Here’s the final result:

I’ll probably get around to painting it eventually, but I don’t think it looks too bad as it is.

In addition to the Bull Moon Ride, Cary and I spent this weekend doing house work. First, we replaced our kitchen sink faucet:

The old faucet was somehow hampering water flow…I had initially wondered whether there may be a problem with the water pressure in our house, because the kitchen faucet produced a pretty weak stream, and the sprayer was all but useless. It appears that it was the faucet all along. The new faucet works great. After replacing the faucet, though, I found that we had a new leak. I think it was caused by the old hoses under the sink. One of the hose connections was rusted, and moving it around probably loosened up a corroded rubber seal. So a quick trip to the local hardware store fixed that problem:

That was the big project for the weekend, but I also managed to buy a bench vise for the garage along with the hardware for mounting it to the workbench:

This will come in really handy the next time I need to, y’know, squeeze or bend something.