Other Projects - Page 2


Trees - April '99

Even though my house is in the middle of an urban area, there were entirely too many trees on the property. Most of the back yard is covered by flagstone, but along the edge there are fruit trees. Unfortuately, they are all at about a 2-foot spacing. Which probably looked ok when they were saplings, but as mature trees, they were choking each other out, so they needed to be thinned. Mike and Ray came over one Saturday in April and helped to cut down seven of these trees. I only cut down ornamental orange trees, saving the two edible grapefruit trees, along with a couple of other orange trees. We also cut down a queen palm (I really don't like palms, and it was about dead anyway) in the front yard, and pulled up a couple of dead shrubs near the front door. I spent months geting rid of the tree debris!

In October 2000, I also had the two very large (but quite dead) pine trees removed from the front yard, along with the large palm tree on the corner of 5th and Windsor. So, to date I have removed eleven trees from the property, but still have seven remaining.

Front of the house, Day 2Morning of Oct 31, 2000

The picture on the left was taken within a couple days of moving in. It shows the dead bushes and the queen palm that I removed. The picture on the right was taken the morning that we had the big trees taken out (Oct 31, 2000). It happened to be a foggy morning. You can also see that this is about the time I cut the oleanders down to the ground.

Front of the house todayFront yard

Here's what it looks like now. The grass has mostly filled in, and the front yard is much cleaner-looking. The oleanders are coming back, too

Backyard trees

Here are a couple of the remaining fruit trees in the back yard. There had been four trees in between these two!


Window Glazing - Summer '99

When I first looked at the house when I was house-hunting, I ruled this house out because of the terribly decayed window glazing. At the time, I didn't know that it was repairable, and it always stuck in my mind. Re-glazing windows is a LOT of work, and I spent all summer doing it. Included in the glazing was the replacing of ten or so broken and cracked window panes. Once I learned the technique, the glazing isn't so difficult, just tedious since there are so many panes. The glazing (if you don't know) is the solid material on the outside of the window that holds the pane against the window frame. It starts out as a putty material that hardens over several weeks' time, then must be painted or it will begin to decay prematurely. The glazing I replaced was probably the original 50-year-old stuff.

No pictures to show of this one; it's really a pretty boring topic..


Refrigerator Stall - circa. October '99

I bought a new refrigerator when I bought the house.... Unfortunately, it was too big to fit into the assigned refigerator spot! So, we had the refigerator sitting in the kitchen on the opposite side for quite a while, until I decided to do something about it. I tore out the cabinet above the refigerator stall, and then cut the facing adjacent to the spice drawers back about an inch. this gave just enough space to slide the fridge in. I also installed a shelf where the cabinet had been for some extra storage space. This whole setup has always been considered temporary, since we are planning on redoing the kitchen eventually anyway. But it made a huge difference in the usable space in our kitchen, so it's worth mentioning here..

Unmodified refrigerator stallCabinet removed

Here are the original cabinets (and that yucky harvest gold electric range). The spot is just too small to accomodate a larger modern refigerator. The shot on the right is part way through the project. This is probably the first 'mid-project' picture I ever took.

Refrigerator after

And here it is now, with the refigerator in place... We put all kinds of junk up here, including a bunch of magnets!
The range has also been replaced with a new gas model.


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