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