Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish...

The Ortega’s finally came back, and hauled off the last of the rocks from the spa they busted out in October. I’ve been living with those eyesores in our dog run since BEFORE Halloween. After the snow hit I was concerned that the dogs might jump the fence because the rocks under the snow made the snow bank a lot higher that it would have normally been. We called them several times about coming back over to finish the job, but got no response, so we thought they were going to stiff us. We were really shocked at their behavior because we have hired them for several jobs before, and they always showed up on time, and did the job efficiently.

We ran into a slight disagreement over two of the pieces, which were large concrete footings, they tried to tell me that they weren’t part of the job (ha!), and that they shouldn’t have to haul them off, that and they were too heavy for them to lift. They were part of the job because they were within the rock they were busting out. As a solution we could both live with I asked them to bury them over where we stack the wood, so now they are out of sight, and won’t be in the way of any future planting projects, or the new location of our patio set.

It just goes to prove that you shouldn't pay somebody before the work gets done. They bid the job very reasonably, so when we agreed on the amount (under $150) we expected to have the work done in a week. We even felt sorry for them because they had to make so many runs to the dump that we gave them an extra $70. I later found out that they just pocketed the money, and dumped the rocks in the river bed!

And it kept snowing, and snowing, and snowing, and...

This is what the front yard looked like this morning. That flagpole is about 7 feet off the ground, so that gives you some idea of how that snowbank is. Also if you look to the left of the flag you can see our shed. The storm circled around and hit us again later that morning.

6:46PM ~ It took us about 15 minutes to shovel the walkway and we were just relaxing when we both saw a flash of light that looked like lightning out the side window and then we heard something like thunder, but the thunder sounded distant. I opened the back door and could hear the snowplow on one of the nearby streets maybe it wasn’t thunder at all but the sound of the blade hitting the street. That just leaves the bright light to explain. I’d say it might have been a transformer but the lights didn’t go out. Maybe a squirrel got electrocuted. It just doesn’t seem likely that it was lightening. I don’t even know if it can lightning and thunder during a snow storm. Can it thunder and lightning during a snowstorm? I had to know so I Googled it and this is what I found out...

Thunder and lightning sometimes happen in a snowstorm, although it is somewhat rare, said Fred Gadomski, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University. In fact, he said, the biggest snowstorms are those marked by thunder and lightning, a phemomenon meteorologists call a “thunder snow.”

9:46PM ~ We just finished watching a movie and had to go dig out the pathway again, about 4-5 inches has fallen since 7:30. The snowplow just made a run and buried the front of our path so I had to dig it out again. While I was up there I noticed that he pushed some snow up against the side of Eric’s Jeep burying it too, we'll have to dig that out in the morning.

Snow Again!

27.5° feels like 19°

All in all a very cold and wet next few days are ahead of us. Speaking of snow we got hit with another snowstorm. It was big as the last one and it hit just about the time that most of the snow from the previous storm had melted from the last one too. So, we had snow above the three foot picket fence again and 5 1/2 foot berms. Eric is having a war with the snow plow guy. Yesterday just as he was loading up the Jeep the snow plow came by and buried our walkway to the street so he had to dig it out again. Now we have put stakes with blue flags on them on either side of the walkway and we are hoping that he won't bury us again. And now we are supposed to get hit with a storm at least as bad as the last one. That means we will have another foot or more on top of the snow we have now. I hope we don't get snowed in again. I can't afford to not be down the hill for Becca, so that means if it starts to snow heavily I'm going to have to stay at her place until the weather clears up and I can come back home. Unfortunately, both of us will be down the hill when this big storm hits so we won't know how bad it is until we try to come up. Thankfully, our neighbors will watch out for the dogs

Blue skies, smiling at me. Nothing but blue skies do I see...

Today it was clear, and we started the day by digging a path out to the street the berm had now grown to 5 ft high. The snow was too deep to dig out the gate so we dug out the path that Derran (our neighbor) left when he came over to visit yesterday. He found the narrowest part of the berm he could find, which was on the parking pad, and crawled over the snow bank and then walked across the pad, and down the planter to the front door. We needed to get Eric's Jeep dug out from across the street; it looked like a giant snowball. He has more than two feet of snow on the roof. Derran, and Linda came over, and helped us dig the Jeep out for a while even with their help it still took us 3 hours to dig it out! We got it out just in time for the snowplow to come by again. It was a guy in a grader, and when he saw our street he apologized, and said he had no idea our road was so bad. He went a got a guy with a front loader, and the two of them cleared the road down to the pavement. The guy in the front loader took all the snow, and pushed it off into the vacant lot on the other side of Steve’s place. This guy was really nice, and really knew his stuff. He dug my jeep out, and then cleared the whole street so that we could actually park on the road. This morning it was a nightmare. Before he showed up the street was buried in 20-inches of snow, and cars were stranded all over the place. People couldn't get down it so they just abandoned their vehicles wherever they stoppedLinda was in touch will CalTrans, and she said that they aren't letting anyone up even residents. You can go down the mountain but they won't let you back up. As of 1:30pm they shut down Hwy 38 completely because there's an avalanche above us, so no traffic can come down our way from Big Bear or Arrowhead. Eric had to cancel several students this week because of the storm but he is determined to go down to his gig Friday night. I'm worried for him, there's alot of ice on the road. I asked him to stay down the hill if he can get down, and not to come back up or to worry about me. I have plenty of food, wood for the fire, and we just bought a Coleman stove if the power goes out again.As of 4:09 pm (which is when I'm typing this letter) the skies are still blue over us but there are menacing clouds coming over the ridge.The weather man predicted sun with scattered clouds for the next few days but we have another storm coming in from the Gulf of Alaska that's supposed to hit on Christmas Eve: just what we need more snow. If it does hit I don't think we will be having the kids up here for Christmas. It would just be too dangerous so, we'll have to reschedule it for another day.

Enough Snow, I mean it!

Still snowing, hit the 15-inch mark. At 4:15 in the morning the power came back on, which was a blessing because it meant that the blower on our fireplace insert worked, and it didn't take long to heat the cabin up. We spent most of the day playing games, and watching the snow come down. The snowplow driver that came by that night broke down our picket fence when he plowed the street. To give you an idea of how wide the berm is in front of the house, our picket fence sits 10 ft back on the property, and the snow drift is about 4 ½ ft high. When we looked out the door last night before we went to bed you couldn't see the fence or the gate any more, and the foot prints I had left earlier in the day, when I went to the trash can, had been all filled in. There was almost 2 ft of snow on the roof, and at least that much by the door. The snowplow came back, and made a run around 4am. It snowed steadily all last night.

Diggin' In

It snowed all night, and at some point we hit the 12-inch mark. It’s snowing still. This the morning around 4am the power went out. Great! Around noon there was a temporary lull in the storm so I suggested that we should go down the hill to Wal-Mart, and buy some supplies, and get a Coleman stove, some propane gas for it, some lamp oil, wicks, and candles. We stocked up on canned goods, and simple meals like Macaroni and Cheese. By the time we got home it was starting to get dark, and we still had to take all the food down the embankment, which was now about 24 inches high. Eric started a fire, and I started taking all of the food in the fridge out to the backyard, and burying it in a snow bank. We roasted hot dogs in the fireplace, and ate them by lantern light. We already had a Colman propane lantern in the emergency kit I kept in the shed, also without power the blower on our fireplace insert didn't work, and it got a little nippy in the house. Needless to say it was an exhausting day, and we bundled up in warm clothes, and went to bed around 9:30. It snowed steadily all night.

What A Transformation!

When we bought the house back in October of 2000 it looked like this half hidden behind an overgrown yard and painted a dark brown color that literally made it fade into the background.





After some serious trimming of trees and clearing of overgrown shrubs (they were a fire hazard anyway),and a lot of hard work by me busting out that driveway over the summer, the house looked like this.this.

And now it looks like this.
There was only one thing missing and that came next.

The finishing touch was the picket fence. The process took about a month to complete and it was worth every penny.

Now I just have to work on the landscaping.

A Stairway To Heaven

This is my second attempt at steps and I think I did much better this time. I found these wonderful bricks at Home Depot. They can be used for small retaining walls and weigh about 5 lbs a piece. I like the way the seemlessly blend in with the soil, and they are really good at holding it back and staying in place.

It's Getting There...

We have almost finished at this point. The house, the shed and the carport were finished but we still needed more room to store our stuff; the lumber in the yard is from the original shed I wanted built. I wanted it built across the front of the yard thinking it might give us some privacy in the front of of the house The shed was going to be 10x20, but as they put the sides up I realized that it looked horrible so we had the brothers unassemble it and use the wood to build the two new sheds. They were the nicest peopl to work with and they were very professional with reasonable rates. They didn't even charge us to take the original shed down!

Now that the shed and the house are painted the same it's not looking so bad. We bought a patio set and you can barely see it in the side yard. We also added shutters to two of the windows and coordinating flower boxes to the shed.

It's all starting to come together...

You can see in the backyard that the other shed is now completed and painted to match the rest of the house. I removed all the iris’ from in front of the Adirondack chairs and planted some hedges behind them; they are still thriving. After all of the commotion during painting all my Johnny-Jump-Ups died and did not come back again. The Virginia creeper is growing back on the trellis although it had to be severely cut back so they could paint the house. It’s slowly beginning to recover. The vinca has almost completely covered the unsightly and useless propane tank. Another project on the horizon will be to move the hose bib to the side of the house, right now it’s behind the trellis and is a bear to get at.

My Green Thumb

As you can see spring is turning into summer and with the heat the plants go crazy, what was once a barren wasteland is now beginning to fill in with greenery. The large bush in the background is the black locust that I need to cut back every year. The shrub in front of that is the hydrangea which gets a lacy cream-colored flower on it all through summer, and as you can see the vinca that I planted is taking root. I planted some things on the other side of the stairs; some are holding on and others didn't make it so I have this hodgepodge of plants going on over there. I've got to make a decision on whether or not to pull them up and start over again or just leave them be and see what happens.

You're going to paint it what color?!?

Here you can see the shed trim getting a coat of primer. We really freaked some people on the street out because they thought that this was going to be the color of the house. I also planted a row of Hawthorne shrubs at the top of the street.

The Box in the Front Yard

At this point the shed looks like a hideous box in the front yard and I was beginning to have serious doubts about why I agreed to put it there in the first place. But it serves a purpose, you can see how the shed effectively hides the neighbors house, which now has a two story room addition off the back and is painted pumpkin yellow, which is a sight more uglier than my boxy shed. The previous owners sold the house to some people, who let’s say have unusual color tastes. I think they were trying to go for the color of pine wood and ended up looking like a yellow orange crayon instead.

Shades of Gray

This is what the house looked like after it was primed. Notice we took off the railing that went across the top window in the front of the house. We also removed all of the alpine-like shelves under the windowsills. They were rotting anyway and they didn’t fit with the new look I was going for.

Sanford and Son meets the Beverly Hillbilies

This is what was hidden behind that wooden section of fence you see from the front yard. I know it’s a mess. There’s the cheap tin shed, our gardening tools, the trash cans, branches from a tree we pruned ourselves, a piece of plywood we have nailed to the side of the house to cover up the previous owners doggie door, (if a dog can get out a raccoon can get in!), and last but not least the worst “no, no” of all… firewood stacked on the deck up against the house. All of this stuff has since been removed and it is now the site of a very nice dog run. The plywood has been removed from the side of the house and is now been properly mended and painted, and there's no more litter in the yard just two dog houses. By the way, the dark brown section of wood planking, in the upper right hand corner, is our neighbor’s idea of a good fence.

A $3000 Lesson

The guys who built the shed did such a good job we asked them to build us a carport as well. We were so excited to have something to keep the pinecones, sap and other debris from hitting our cars. We had it painted the same color as the house and shed so it matched and I put a beautiful green wreath on the front of it with some classy numbers. It really added to the property and it was functional. We had it for two years and when they resurfaced the street the county cited us for not having a permit and it being 3 ft on the easement, and they made us take it down. If it would have been even with the trunk of the pine tree they probably wouldn't have bothered us at all. It made us so mad! It’s not like we live in the city. We live in a very rural area in the middle of a national forest we will probably never have sidewalks. It was an expensive $3000 lesson.

Keeping Up With The Neighbors

At this point I'm ashamed to say that our yard didn't look any better than the next door neighbors, but ours was temporary, not so for next door. This is what the side yard looked like right after we had the chain link put up. We didn’t have any proper wood stackers, which we have since remedied, and so we piled the wood along the fence. Since then we added another section of fence (about where the blue tarp is)and a gate to make a rectangular dog run. We set aside ten feet in the back corner to stack our wood in.

An Unsightly View...

This is a view of the front yard on the left side. There is the piece of log that was never removed. What an eyesore! The tree is another Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum). This area is a gentle slope of about 3 to 3 ½ feet. I am considering planting some evergreen trees or shrubs there to hide the nasty view. The house next door is a rental and the landlord (slumlord actually) never does any repairs or maintenance on the place. How do you like the blue and green tarp covered leanto?

Some people are like slinkies...

Not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one stumble down the stairs. (Unknown)

And believe me we did our share of stumbling last winter so that is why I made this first attempt at making easy to walk down stairs. This also is a view of the parking pad and retaining wall. As you can see when we had the parking pad made it pretty much denuded the area of any plant life, except a wild hydrangea bush and a couple of irises. In front of the car you can see what remains of the stump from the oak tree that was felled and left in the yard by a previous owner. The river rocks were brought in by the people we bought the house from. At the top of the stairs you can still see a portion of what used to be the driveway.

A Path That Leads to Nowhere...

This is a view of the lower yard near the front door. It was mostly covered by asphalt when we moved in. I had to place a berm where the rocks are to keep the rainwater from washing away the yard. Just below the propane tank the dirt poured out onto a lovely set of steps and a pathway made out of rocks that led to the backyard. There was another large tree in the corner just opposite or the propane tank that one of the previous owners had cut down to a stump. The ground, shown in the lower right hand corner, is about 3 feet higher than the pathway and is held in place by a rock wall. The other side of the path is bordered by another, lower, rock wall and there is vinca planted all over there; it’s also where the maple and evergreen trees are planted.