This was a Very Good Day

I'm psyched. I had a good day. This was in part because I wasn't hungover for a change (shup), and had the energy to tackle some projects. I'm sick to death of having lived here over a year and not gotten nearly as much done as I'd like. So today, progress ensued.

You may recall that I have a vision for what I call the 'dining room garden' - the area right outside the dining room door, which we use as our main entrance. I had decided to turn it into a little private garden. That's only a small part of my ultimate "re-landscaping the entire front half of the property" project, but it's where I wanted to start.

Last year I dug up the evergreen shrubs under the dining room window, and planted my azaleas. One of them is blooming nicely; the other two not as much, but I'm not worried - they'll be okay.


Phase II was this.


Or rather, that's the start of it. I wanted to put a fence along this row of shrubs, not a total and complete privacy fence, but just a nice little delineating fence. So yesterday we bought that fencing, and the posts, and all the stuff we'd need for this project.

Today we tackled it. This is what it looked like before.


But we couldn't fit a fence up against those shrubs, so I decided they were going to get trimmed to accomodate the fence.


In some cases that involved just about cutting them in half.


But I'm not too worried about it. I don't really care for the evergreen shrubs and plan to take them out entirely at some point, anyway (just not today - too big a job). So I'm not really concerned how this effects them. The taller green leafy shrubs I'm hoping to keep, so I'm just going to hope this doesn't hurt them. I don't see why it should - we only pruned off some branches from the bottoms to make them - well, flatter on the back, so we could get the fence in. We did far more slaughter to the evergreens than the leafy shrubs, and as I said, the leafy ones are the ones I plan to keep.

I don't believe this is going to look nasty from the dining room garden side, once the fence is up to camouflage some of it. If it does, well, I'll deal with that then. And from the front, they still look perfectly normal - you can't even tell they've been pruned.

After the shrubs were trimmed we set the post anchors and dropped the posts in place, just to check the fit.


Perfect. I couldn't finish this today because it was going to rain. I'm going to paint the posts and fence, but I didn't want to leave them out to get wet in the rain, then have to wait for them to dry to paint them. So they're all stashed back in the garage until a sunny weekend when I have time to do all the painting.

But I'm psyched. I think this is going to look awesome! After I get the fence up, I'm going to plant stuff along the edge on the dining room garden side (that's partly why the fence had to go in far enough that we had to trim the shrubs - I wanted a planting strip on the sidewalk side), and will probably affix some window-box type planters to the fence itself if I can find the right type (they'll need to hang) and if it feels sturdy enough to hold that weight. So I'll begin to have bunches of flowers adorning this area. I may even plant some climbing vines or something.

As soon as a better selection of annuals is out, I'm going to be planting some stuff in front of the azaleas too. I was at the garden center the other day, but despite the good weather, it's still a little early yet and the selection's still kind of limited. I'm ahead of the game this year, anyway, so I can be a little patient. (Most years I'm thinking about going to pick out some annuals around the end of May, not the end of April).

Greg did the majority of the work on that project, pruning the shrubs and setting the post anchors (a massive chore). I chose to use those rather than digging holes and concreting them in for a bunch of reasons. This isn't a good area of the yard to be trying to dig holes, with electrical wiring running around somewhere (there are several outdoor plugs installed out here), massive tree roots in the way, etc. And, I kind of liked the idea of them being a little less "permanent" - in case I ever change my mind about having the fence here.

But I didn't merely sit on my butt and direct traffic today. I did accomplish something myself. My first goal of the morning was to finally clean out the damned garage. It's been bugging me for almost a year, when we emptied out our rented storage unit last summer and dumped it all in the garage. Now that I'm getting all psyched about my gardening, I desperately wanted room to organize all my stuff.

So I tackled the garage. It started off looking something like this.




Except there was a big-ass pile of firewood running up the middle of it (where the empty spot is now, that was filled with firewood). I forgot to take a picture before I moved it, but this is the pile I moved ...


... so you can do the math. (That stuff in front of it is two concrete benches from my dad's house, that I haven't yet found a place for, but needed moved to accomodate the firewood).

Then I cleaned up and organized my stuff, and this is the semi-finished end product.




I have more to do, but this was a great start. At least I can get to all my stuff.

I've given up getting my truck in this garage until we can ever get a storage / gardening shed. There simply isn't room in the back of this garage for all the gardening and lawn stuff, and all Greg's outdoor workshop stuff, together. Not happening. So until we get that shed, the garage is it, and my truck's going to have to live in the driveway.

And that was a day's work, and I'm sore and exhausted, and headed off for a shower.

But it was a really good day.