May 2008 Archives

I'm happy to report that I've finished tearing down the chicken coop and breaking down the rotten lumber and other debris. All told, it took me several Saturdays and a few hours during the weeknights over the last month to break down the larger pieces, remove all the nails from all the boards, separate the roofing shingles from the lumber, and spray termite and ant colonies that were eating the coop from the inside out.

Here's the freshly cleared site with the stack of lumber that I still have to dispose of:

This is the view of the cleared area looking into the woods. We're working with a landscaper to have them clear the leaves back to the line of larger trees as well as nuke the poison ivy.

Here's the long view of the area that I've cleared. The Chicken coop stood in the bare brown area on the right of the foreground. After the landscaper clears the leaves and nukes the poison ivy, we'll probably tear down the picket fence and put in some natural divider between the grass and the wooded area. We're considering planting wildflowers in the area below the trees rather than planting more grass, covering the area with bark mulch, or spending a lot of time and energy to create a complex garden area.

Last month I posted a photo from my last day of production at Generation, my college magazine. Annemarie, one of the people in that photo, sent an e-mail to some of our friends from college and Evan forwarded this photo from our 1989 Thanksgiving celebration at Annemarie's apartment:

Here's the list of suspects (left-to-right):

• 1st row: Evan, Jen, Larry (w/ beard), Beth, Jim, Liesl, Chris


• 2nd row: Guillermo, Leigh Ann, Scott, Tom (w/ the hat)


• 3rd row: me, Gregg, mystery man (half hidden), Kathleen, Jon, Annemarie, Lori, & Mike (standing)

So one of the things that Melissa and I decided to do with the house thing Spring is to paint the living room. As you may recall, it had nasty mint green paint contrasting with bland wood paneling on either side of brick fireplace. Here's what it looked like:

We considered tearing down the paneling and replacing it with drywall, but ultimately decided to try painting it to see how it looked. Melissa, with help from the clerk at the Benjamin Moore store, selected one of their new Aura paints, which is both self-priming and self-leveling. This saved a lot of time with sanding and priming the paneling, not to mention that it looks fantastic! Kudos to Melissa on her choice of color--deep purple--and her hard work on painting the paneling.

This last photo shows Alpaca, the sand-like color we picked for the adjoining walls. Unlike the wall with the paneling, we had to prime these walls with two coats.

I've spent the last few weeks cleaning weeds, leaves, and miscellaneous junk out of the back forty. Now that I've got most of that out of the way and a dumpster delivered, it was time to tearing down the chicken coop. Here's a couple of photos from the process: