Before

Aaaaaand, that brings us roughly up to speed!

While we slept last night, our entire region was pummeled with snow! We kept gleefully looking out the windows at the back of the house to watch the snow blow around and drift, and this morning we were greeted with the following scenes:

I live pretty close to downtown, and my street is still pretty much impassable. A plow made one sweep down the street, carving a sidewalk-sized path in the street with 4′ drifts on either side. Since I don’t trust my little Escort to make the trek to work, and all of the bus lines are shut down, I’m housebound for the day! It’s too bad we weren’t able to snag more supplies for the basement remodel yesterday before we were snowed in, but we’re still making really good progress.

As I said before, we grew a bunch of veggie plants up from heirloom seeds we got from Baker Creek Seeds. While most of the flower seeds we got from them didn’t do much, the veggies are flourishing. I was really scared that all of the tomatoes weren’t going to survive the chilly weather we had right after we transplanted them into the ground. They stalled for what seems like forever! My boss told me that they’d pick up after it got really hot and sunny for a few days, and she was totally right.

Here's one of our tomato plants.

The squash is getting huge!

Peas!

My borage has exploded! I need to figure out what to do with it.

We ended up supplementing our heirloom plants with a few from the local hardware store, since our hot peppers didn’t seem to be faring too well and I wanted some more herb varieties.

Onions

This thyme smells delicious.

Dill

We’ve also got some volunteer oregano from last year that’s come back with a vengeance, some mint that doesn’t taste/smell very minty (weird), and a few other goodies. In case you’re craving some full-yard shots, here you go (ignore the weeds!):

Here's the coldframe that Kevin built to act as a greenhouse for the seedlings to get them ready to plant.

And here are the seedlings themselves! I'm a proud seed mama.

They're getting so big! Almost ready to go in the ground!

We’re going to have a pretty giant garden this year, including a very large plot dedicated almost entirely to herbs. My oregano and mint from my little herb plot last year actually (surprisingly) came back this year, which is a little magical to me. Nature amazes me.

What are you planting this year?

Here you can see the dual vegetable garden areas on either side of the sidewalk leading down to the garage/alley. We have effectively more than doubled our plot from last year.

Here's Kevin laying down the landscaping fabric between one of the veggie garden plots and the area where I'll have my herb garden (it will be epic). Landscaping fabric is awesome, and Menards just happened to have it on sale this weekend.

One of the trails laid with landscaping fabric, and lined with Purington Pavers, historic bricks and the same kind that several streets in Iowa City are paved with.

The first batch of gravel has been spread. It'll take one or two more loads to get the coverage we want, although I don't think we can finish the gravel paths until the fountain pond thing is completed.

This is not a firepit! It's a planter that looks like a firepit, and which will be dismantled and replaced with (hopefully) one of those whiskey half-cask planters, if I can find one that isn't $40.

Next post: Revenge of the Seedlings!

We weren’t going to be so naive this year, so we ended up ordering heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company, a business specializing in heirloom seeds out of Missouri. We definitely wanted to go heirloom, since we’re not into Frankenfoods and we like doing things the old-fashioned way.

We ended up ordering a metric ton of seeds (after teasing our friend JoAnn about the amount she wanted, we ordered at least 25% MORE than she did), and last weekend we embarked on the process of sprouting the little bastards. We had no idea what we were doing, but we went to Menards and bought a bunch of setups for growing seedlings, including peat pellets and little biodegradable pots, and we got to work winging it. It’s less than a full week later, and as you can see, we’ve already got growth!

Too bad Mother Nature is taunting our progress.

Sad face.

I should mention that we had actually tried a sample of the Menards paint in the color we chose. In fact, we had a lovely stripe of it next to the front door for months before we finally got around to prepping the house for painting, and while we agreed that it was a little on the bright side, we still felt it was close enough to what we had envisioned and wanted to use it for the whole house. I’m sure our neighbors loved us, having a white house with light blue trim and a big green stripe down the front.

The green that we originally chose gave off a bit of the color blue, but when we found the color closest to it at Home Depot, it was clearly more yellow. That should have been another clue. When Kevin finished up the front of the house, it GLOWED. Our poor neighbors must have thought we were crazy. A few of them walked by while it was this color and said things to the effect of, “Well…I guess it might be okay?” and then scurried away. Kevin and I were embarrassed, to be honest. It certainly hadn’t turned out the way we’d hoped.

I did a little bit of internet reading, and had the idea that we might be able to do some paint doctoring, like by pouring a darker color into it. Kevin decided to try asking Sherwin Williams if they might be able to do something about our situation, since we definitely didn’t want to go all the way up to Home Depot in Cedar Rapids for nothing. He was told they might, so we loaded up all 11 remaining gallons into the trunk of his car and drove over, hoping for a miracle.

We had a paint chip that we thought we’d like, and Sherwin Williams actually has a whole line of brochures that include paint chips from different architectural eras, and we found a color in the “Suburban Modern” brochure (i.e. 1950s) that was pretty close to the paint chip, and the gracious lady working the counter told us she would see what she could do.  She warned us that the color we had chosen to shift our paint to was still pretty bright, and we let her know that we wanted bright, just not, uh, neon. The next day, Kevin picked up the doctored paint and set about covering up the first coat. This was the result:

Perfect! It was exactly, EXACTLY what we’d had in mind. When he was repainting, the new color next to the first green looked almost diarrhea-brown, but now that it’s completely covered it up, we love it. The trim and mailbox will be white, along with the cinderblock foundation. We’ll also be replacing the front storm door (discussion on that will be saved for another post) and storm windows with white ones eventually. Better photos to come!

I should probably begin at the beginning. As you’ve probably noticed when you’ve looked at pictures of the outside of the house, we had a bit of a problem with peeling paint.

Okay, maybe it a little more serious than “a bit of a problem”. Paint all over the house was peeling like crazy, all the way down to the bare wood. It had previously been painted less than 5 years before, and I guess it started peeling less than 6 months afterwards. I don’t know if the paint issues stemmed from poor workmanship, or if it was possibly because, during the years that he had lived there alone, Kevin’s dad had used inside climate control as little as possible, and extreme temperatures coupled with very, VERY poor insulation created issues with the siding and making the paint peel. Maybe it was both of these factors combined, I don’t know. Anyway, it was obviously something that needed to be dealt with, and soon. The homeowner’s insurance company had even started sending us letters telling us the paint needed to be fixed ASAP. (Of course, they started sending these letters to us in JANUARY, which is the perfect time of year for painting the outside of a house, right?)

Anyway, we planned to take care of it as soon as the weather got nice, and thanks to a generous joint birthday gift from my parents, we had the funds to buy some kickass paint. We decided on green, since it wasn’t a very common color on our street, and we both had a vague idea of what shade we wanted. When he was growing up, Kevin’s grandparents’ house was pretty close to what we wanted, bright but not too vivid, a good 50s color. Since then, it has been sided with vinyl in a neutral shade, so we spent a lot of time cruising around town, looking for the perfect flavor of green, and finally found a house that we thought looked like it was the right color. Then came the fumbling.

Instead of knocking on the door and asking the owners directly if they knew the paint color/brand, or at least getting a comparative color, instead we went to Menards, picked up all of the green paint chips, and then parked ourselves across the street and tried to eyeball it. Not too smart. We settled on their shade called “A Little Bit of Lime”. After translating that to a Home Depot/Behr color, it was “Key Lime”. Lime. That should have been a clue that it wasn’t quite right.

Not so bad, right? It looks pretty mellow as a paint chip. Too bad we picked it out in the store, mere minutes before we had 12 gallons of it mixed. If only we’d been able to visualize the shade on the exterior of a house…

AUGH! Yeah, not good. A little too…neon. So, what were we greeted with when Kevin was finished painting the front of the house?

To be continued…

Catnip blooms!

Herb garden:

Oregano

Rosemary

Chives

Sugar snap peas, with their viny fingers twisting around some fencing

One of several tomato varieties

And veggies!

Squash

My poor dead watermelon

Jalapenos, nrom nrom nrom

The watermelon seems to have been the only casualty in the garden so far, although I was afraid of losing my squash on a few occasions. The veggie garden doesn’t get as much sun as it probably should, so the plants are a little shorter than they might be otherwise, but they still seem to be thriving. I’ve noticed a few nibbles on the jalapeno leaves, and I suspect the bunnies in the neighborhood are trying to infiltrate the fence. My dear friend JoAnn gave me a haircut on the back patio last night, and I took all of the cut hair (there was A LOT, man) and tucked it in close to the outside of the fence to keep the rabbits away.