Critters & Rubberneckers

About a week ago, Michele and I went outside around 9 PM, and there he was. Puffy, white tail, perky ears, twitching nose. Nibbling away at the back row of corn. We knew we had to fence in the garden eventually, but now it was imperative.

We ran about 3 feet short of chicken wire. We made due with an empty flooring box. It's workng for now.

This morning, we discovered about half a dozen little holes in the dirt. I'm assuming moles. We have always had grubs in the yard, and we've seen either moles or shrews before. Not sure what to do about that yet. I suppose it's time to Google 'moles in the garden'.

Three new tomato plants were added. They're already budding and we've got a pepper plant beginning to bud as well. And look at those beans and corn.

Now that things are green and growing larger, we're getting comments and questions and odd looks from folks walking and driving by. One lady even hit her brakes, stopping in the middle of the street, and exclaimed, "Oh My Gosh! Look at that garden in the front yard! That's so cute!" She drove off laughing. I think it made her day.

Look at what last week's rain did to our garden. Boom goes the dynamite.

One of Michele's co-workers also drove by and later asked Michele, "Uh, is that corn? Growing in your front yard?" Why, yes. Yes it is. The bi-color is going nuts, but the yellow corn stalks must have been a favorite of our bunny buddies because they look a little decimated. Hopefully, they'll come back.

You can clearly see which corn stalks Peter Cottontail was snacking on. Silly wabbit.

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One final note on the flooring install. Should you ever decide to tackle this DIY project, let me pass along a couple tips.

1. Don't buy knee pads. They save your knee caps, but the straps dig into the soft, fleshy area behind your knees. My solution: I folded up an empty cardboard flooring box then wrapped it with the foam padding placed between the rows of boards in said box. Cost: a few pieces of tape.

2. When possible, the hell with Big Box stores. If you have a local store near you, and they are increasingly rare, please frequent that establishment. I found everything I needed, including some advice, at Hill's True Value Hardware on 933 North. They didn't have things like underlayment, but I'm guessing everything else I got at Menards, I would have found at Hill's. What I did get from Hill's was a new, fine-tooth blade for my miter saw, an invaluable hand-held T-square and several smaller items. The best part about Hill's - they're 2 minutes away and as soon as you walk in the door, someone asks what you're looking for, then (gasp!) knows exactly where you can find it in the store and will take you right to it. Try getting that kind of service from Johnny the snot-nosed teen at Menards.

3. If, like me, you have never used a pneumatic hardwood nailer, sacrifice a board or two and practice a few times with it. Make sure the shoe is adjusted properly and if you do make a miss-fire and shoot a nail into the top of the board instead of the tongue (and you will, believe me), get used to pulling that board out and fixing the mistake. By the second day of using the nailer, I got it down to where I had no problems, but you definitely have to get a feel for it.

At long last, completion

Well, not in the sense that it's "all done" but for all intents and purposes (as well as intensive purposes), the floor, she is down. A few choice shots:

There is still work to be done. The last few boards in the dining room by the back door have to go in, one more row in the hallway that will have to be ripped on the table saw, the rest of the trim work around the stairs, and the quarter round trim (which I haven't even purchased yet) around the entire perimeter.

In all, it was both a rewarding and exhausting experience. Would I do it again? Maybe in a smaller room that is square. The intensive lay down lasted four days, mainly due to the measuring and cutting and adjusting I did around the stairs. But I took my time and I think it shows.

The most amazing part of this job was, despite my wavering walls and my typical inability to get things just right, my boards were perfectly straight all the way across. I varied between 1/4" and 1/8" all the way down the far wall, which I could clearly see was not straight. The house ain't plumb, but my floor sure is, and that is truly amazing to me. Our only problem now is a battle between dark flooring and little white dog hairs. I plan on purchasing stock in the company that makes Swiffer.

This concludes the flooring interlude. Now back to regular programming. I'll get a shot of the garden soon, now encased within chicken wire walls and thriving.

Progress, one board at a time

Day 3 of the flooring install was fairly productive, but ultimately, shorter than I had hoped. Here's what we've got so far:

The angles around the stairs are proving to be the buggers I expected. I made the incorrect assumption that the stairs were even and the trim I'm using to cover my angled cuts would hide all my mistakes. However, I wasted almost an hour of cutting, measuring, fitting, remeasuring, recutting, and refitting the second trim piece along the front of the bannister to realize that I'll need to adjust my plan. Like our walls, the bannister is not quite even.

All in all, though, I am making progress, thanks in no small part to the tremendous help I have gotten from Jeremy, my sister's boyfriend (or is it fiancee, or life partner, or lover, or ?). Once we got our bearings working with the pneumatic flooring nail gun, we got going at a pretty good clip, though I still make an occasional miss fire. (#%$&#*^!)

To celebrate this progress, I went to the liquor store and found, for the first time I have seen in Northern Indiana, Fat Tire Ale from New Belgium. In a word, yum. Thanks for reading. Salud!

And so, it begins

Flooring install, Day 1:

After nearly two hours at Menards on Saturday, hunting, fiddling, playing with tools, and generally looking like I knew exactly what I was there to get, this was all I needed to get started. Knee pads, slap hammer, staples for slap hammer, 2" finish nails, some brads for a borrowed nail gun and a nail set pack. I pretty much already have or have borrowed the other tools I need. But I did buy the wrong staples for the slap hammer, so I made one trip back to Menards to get the right ones. All in all, that's not too bad. You always expect one extra trip back to the store for something. Thank God this isn't plumbing, or I would have put 200 miles on my truck going back and forth. That, and I absolutely loathe all things plumbing and pipe-related (lookin' at you gas lines). Does that make me a homophobe? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I went to Lowe's to buy my underlayment - 30# roofing felt. I would have gotten it at Menards, but they keep all their felt outside and the last thing I wanted was to unroll my underlayment and discover it was soaking wet from sitting out in the rain. Not a good thing for underneath a wood floor. I'm starting in the corner of the window well area there, and right off the bat, I will be cutting a hole for the register as well as the angled end cuts around the stairs (see below). My hope is, by the time I get past this section, the rest of the room(s) will seem easy.

Here's the opposite end of that wall where it dies into a 60-degree angle where the stairs jut into the main level. How, you may ask yourself, did I know it was a 60-degree angle? Why, with that little, blue, $1 grade school protractor I dug out of Isaac's bookbag. I measured the angle on the underlayment and made a perfect cut on my first try. It can only go downhill from here. Today, after I snap my chalk lines to mark the floor joists, I will face-nail the first row of boards in the window well area, then I'll dummy (read: set, but not nail down) as much of the floor as I can and make as many of my cuts as possible. On Monday, I'm renting a pneumatic hardwood flooring nailer and, hopefully by the time I get it home, I can start slamming boards down right away.

Tomorrow: The best laid (floor) plans of mice and men...

Green stuff, outdoors and in

Picture time - first the garden, then a before shot of the floor.


On the left, there's bi-color sweet corn in the

foreground and green beans in the middle, both of which are growing very well. Behind those are the two transplanted tomato plants (left) that went into shock but seem to be coming back and two transplanted pepper plants (right) that are a litte iffy as well.

The pic on the right shows regular yellow corn in the foreground that is not really taking off, especialy compared to the bi-color next to it, zucchini in the middle that is exploding and cucumbers in the back that seem to be coming along nicely.


Here's a shot from the other side. The bare patch up front (left of the pepper plants) is carrots. They're just beginning to sprout, but only one row so far.


Behind that is a smaller patch of lettuce, but only one little sprout has popped up so far, and that may end up being nothing more than a weed. We'll have to wait and see. One of my projects for this upcoming week of vacation is putting up a chicken wire fence to keep our hoppity neighbors at bay.



And here we have the before of our indoor green project - installing pre-finished bamboo hardwood flooring. Bamboo is one of the most sustainable building products you can use. Since it's a grass, it takes very little time to grow lots and lots of it and, in my opinion, looks really cool. Now, I'm not some kooky enviro-nut, but I think it's a good idea to use renewable resources. Plus, I got a pretty good deal on the wood from Lumber Liquidators and, as I said before, the stuff looks totally bitchin'.


I'm starting in that far left coner by the window and I've got a tricky area around the stairs there that will take a lot of measuring and cutting (and cussing, and whining, and crying, and cussing). I'll post some shots of the in-process work, which will begin today with a bunch of prep work. The pic of the wood there is a little off - it's actually not quite that red, more of a brown. Now, off to Menards to buy underlayment and other fun stuff. More to come later...

Another day, another inch

(No, this is not a commercial for Extenze capsules.) The difference from one day to the next is rather amazing. Sprouts that were barely above the surface just yesterday are now vibrant, green and clearly visible all over our humble little patch of Earth.

The picture to the right is from Saturday, but already these corn shoots look twice this size and there are more of them as well. All four cucumbers are coming up, three of the four zucchinis, four rows of corn (!) four or five green bean plants and the first evidence of carrot and lettuce plants emerging. The tomato and pepper plants that we planted, however, are having a tough time of it and we may need to replant those. Everything that we started from seed seems to be coming along rather nicely.


Next up is the fencing to keep out our little cottontail neighbors who scamper across the lawn every late night when I come home from the Tribune. And, my Cor-A-Vent co-worker and provider of nature's finest fertilizer, Cindy, has a roll of chicken wire she's going to give us. Nice. All ten of my thumbs now have the slightest green hue.


As I mentioned earlier, we're also putting down hardwood flooring in the main/upper level of our house. I'm taking a week off of work to install it myself (!) and I am begging, borrowing, and possibly stealing all the tools I'll need for the job. We're putting down pre-finished bamboo and I'll throw on some pics of that process as well. It's gonna be kick-ass, if I don't ruin it first.

Sprouts and whatnot

Woefully long time between posts, however the garden has been planted and little green fellas are beginning to emerge from the ground, including two rows of corn out of four total. Either we planted the first two rows too deep or the crows were busy removing the seeds for us - not sure.

Pictures will be forthcoming. We've planted two kinds of corn, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, green beans, two kinds of peppers, and a couple herbs - basil and something else.

I've also begun to prep the floor in the house for my major DIY project for this year, prefinished bamboo flooring. It's gonna look beautiful, that is if I don't jack it up. I'll post some pics of that little project as well when I get it going in two weeks.