Drainage Ditch Collapses Under Weight of Success

The universe is really looking favorably upon my little house, making up for the two-month ordeal with the landscaper (resulting in grass being planted in June, rather than April) with almost daily rain!  I haven’t even had to consider the ethical dilemma of breaking the water restrictions.

Success, though, turned out to be a mixed blessing (you hear that sometimes).  It was too much for my drainage ditch, which channels storm runoff from the street through a series of back yards and eventually into a creek.

Remember what the ditch looked like before?

And remember how it looked “After?”  All nice and rock-garden-ish?

Still, I had never really paid attention to what happens down there, so during a rainstorm, I slipped outside with my camera, and this is what I saw:

Holy Whitewater, Batman!  I know the storm drain catches both sides of the street, and who knows what else.  After a week of daily thunderstorms, this is what my ditch looks like.

All of the fresh dirt is gone (and grass, and burlap, and erosion-control mesh fabric, and two bales of straw - still in bales) - washed downstream like a lava flow from some red-clay volcano.   My rocks are lying in the bottom of a canyon. 

I don’t know what to do with it, and I’m irked that I can see it from my home-office window, which makes “denial” a pretty ineffective coping mechanism.

My Own Back Yard

When you move into a house that’s been abandoned for over 5 years, you realize just how quickly things go to pot.  Every square inch.  To pot.  Each time I complete some miniscule piece of the project (that probably takes 10 hours, five band-aids, four episodes of therapeutic rage reduction, three beers, and an Epsom salt bath), I comment, “Ahh, now it’s starting to look like somebody lives here.”

This place is so small (.22 acres) that every inch needs to be manicured - there’s no room for wasteland, but taming it has been an ordeal.  No offense to anyone who bush-hogs 50 acres for a living.  But I’m crawling around yanking things out by hand, usually by myself, and sawing things down that usually fall on my head, and it’s full of poison ivy, and it’s been over 100 degrees here, which at least deserves a “bless your heart,” don’t you think?

Of course, around here, “Bless her heart” is usually followed by something like, “but she’s dumb as a stump.”

Anyway, bit by bit, it’s coming along.  Here’s a shot of the back yard “before”:

And here’s the back yard today.  It doesn’t look like much, but here lies several days of sweating.  Turns out, that overgrowth was concealing a large assortment of huge buried rocks - guess somebody wanted a rock garden, then forgot about it, perhaps as a sinister joke on the next owner.  I used them to pretty up the drainage ditch.

This afternoon I put down 10 bales of pine needles in the back yard.  I went with pine needles because I was getting tired of shoveling out dirt and mulch from my pickup, one sweaty metric ton at a time.  Compared to craziness such as that, pine needles are lightweight and really don’t feel much like work a’tall.

Outside makeover is coming right along!

By the end of today, I was so excited - I’ve been impatient to make enough headway on the outside of the house to be able to post some photos, and today I can!  After working half a day on a french drain and grading issues, I spent the rest of the afternoon putting up the rest of the exterior mouldings.  I’m so excited, in fact, that I’m going to ramp up the dramatic effect using some “before” pictures. 

This is how the house looked in July 2006, when I first bought it.

And this is the house in March 2007, after I (in desperation for some improvement) put up a salvaged storm door and new porch lights.

And… drumroll please…

This is the house, as it looks this evening, almost two years after that first photo was taken.  It’s barely recognizable to ME, and I live here! 

Shutters - Not Always an Open-and-Shut Case

Houdini says that “Black Magic” is the perfect color to paint shutters and front doors!  I did go with the “el cheapo” paintable vinyl shutters from Lowes.  I really wanted the solid cedar ones, but with my budget I have to pick my treats carefully.

It only took one coat of bonding primer, two coats of paint, and multiple coats of spackle and touch-up paint from where half of them were hung upside down.  Arggh.  It was one of those mistakes - at the end of the day, no less, while putting up the LAST shutter - that couldn’t have been more deflating if the whole front yard had opened up into a sinkhole.

But they’re all right now, and they look nice.  No amount of paint, and no type of paintbrush, would cover up the fakey-fake wood grain pattern (why do they make horrible fake imitations, instead of letting things be what they are?) - but I used Satin paint and it isn’t as obvious.

Digging for Trouble

Ahh, progress.  What you’re looking at is the Day Castle Moat, the two-inch-deep ring of water around my side porch as a result of my grading job.  The grading was supposed to “improve drainage.”

Oh, it improved it, all right.  It routed all the water to my porch.  The childish side of my anger wants to make it clear that I didn’t like this plan from the start, and I brought it up before the process, during the process, and after the process.  But all I knew was that it didn’t “look right” - that doesn’t get much credibility with guys on Bobcats; in fact, the landscaper’s response was “I think you’re overanalyzing.”  And besides, this was the “easier” way.  (When I’m writing a check with four digits, the word “easier” does not fall pleasantly on the ears).

Today I will spend the day remembering the way I do things.  Instead of paying someone (who is trained and experienced) to tell ME how to improve my drainage, I will be pounding wooden stakes into the ground, stretching out strings and line levels, determing exactly how many inches of slope I can get (guess what? none of those things were a part of the “professional” job), then pointing to the contractor and saying “I want you to fill it to HERE and slope it to HERE” and then watching until it is done.  At least, that’s the plan.  Currently there’s a slight problem with getting phone calls returned, which is posing the teensiest threat to my cheerful goodwill with the landscaper, who up until now has been very nice, showed concern, and has showed up on schedule (which does earn points, if you’ve ever worked with subcontractors before). 

All ye who rolled their eyes at me when I said, “I think I might rent a Bobcat and do this myself,” look closely at the Day Castle Moat and reconsider your reaction! 

New Front Porch

Remember that old front stoop?

Today’s the day for the front porch makeover.  I was intimidated by the prospect, but of course I tackled it anyway (you wouldn’t have me do it any differently, right?)  First to create the form, using a piece of flexible masonry siding and lots of strings to make sure it was level from side to side and sloping away from the door about one inch (for water drainage).

Then to get to mixing!  24 bags of concrete at 60 pounds per bag…  that’s, hmm, let’s see, 1440 achy back muscles and about as many skinned knuckles.

And it’s done! 

(I’m really thinking my exterior photos would be a lot less interesting if I fixed that crazy porch light that isn’t supposed to come on during the daytime).

Foundation Plantings!

Slowly but surely, the outside of this house is getting the attention it deserves, and this weekend was a marathon of digging.  Seven Otto Luyken laurels, two white azaleas, one English holly, and three more shrubs awaiting planting, plus pine needles and several bags of “Daddy Pete’s Plant Pleaser,” a wonderful product of a local dairy farm.  Thanks again to Matt, who simply showed up with a shovel and said, “Here?” 

After this weekend, I need a bumper sticker that reads, “My money and my vertebrae go to Farm House Gardeners.” 

Remember that ugly ditch?  Here’s a shot after Dad helped me cut down all the overgrowth.

And here’s how it looks after being filled in with dirt and some special attention at the mouth of the pipe including plastic, big rocks (that were pried up out of the back yard) and some snippets of monkey grass and sedum.

Houdini is pleased that his Cat-Cave now has “purr appeal.”  The rest of the ditch is much shallower now, and it is planted with grass seed and lined with burlap to keep the dirt in place until the grass grows.

Landscape Grading

This week’s project has brought out the neighbors in droves.  I mean, how often do you look out your window on an early spring morning and see dump trucks?  In the eyes of my 2-year-old neighbor, Ian, I have catapulted into a fame previously unfathomed.

The previous photos don’t do it justice, but this yard was a mini-mountain-range of swells, swales, hills, and hollers.  To make matters worse, the drainage was terrible, turning the front yard into a swampy mess when it rains.

At the end of Day 1, the landscape is definitely looking smoother. 

After only 2 days, grass is planted and the bulldozers are leaving.

Although it doesn’t look drastically different, the front yard is now gently sloped off to the sides, to channel water runoff away from the house.

Brick and Structural Issues

OK, I’m ready to talk about it now.  There are a lot of cracks in my brick facade, as well as some separation from the wall behind.  The matter had loomed until it was threatening to crack MY facade, so I called in a brickmason for a look-see. 

After the first visit, I laid awake that night replaying his assessment in my head, including words like, “Man, you can throw a cat through that one…”

Here’s what happened in 1947, and since I wasn’t there I’m not ashamed to admit it. The brick was not tied in to the structure of the house - it’s just “on” there. The house has settled due to the poor water drainage around the foundation - basically, the house has sunk out from under the brick, resulting in the cracks.

I am at heart a preservationist (and frugal), and it would break my heart to tear off all this beautiful old brick.  Instead, I opted for an “arrest and prevent” measure:  repair the cracks in the brick, then concentrate on the water and foundation issues to stop the settling.

Here you can see the brick after it has been tuck pointed.  The cracks are nearly invisible now, and the situation seems much more hopeful.  Now to call a landscape contractor about the water drainage…

Shutter Decisions

This afternoon I went to Lowes to check out my options for special-order shutters.  And I really thought I had prepared myself - I even had a preemptive cafe latte - so I really don’t know what went wrong.  I think it all started to go south when the sales clerk confidently denied the existence of products that I was pointing to in the catalog.  Yeah, that’s probably what did it.  I got a little cranky, and I said, “Look.  I can’t afford wooden shutters, and the in-stock vinyl ones look like they’re made out of Big Wheel plastic.  Isn’t there any other material in between?”  And I guess by that time, the clerk was getting cranky too, because he said, “Yeah, you might want to try Kryptonite.”

I left with one set of vinyl shutters as an experiment, to see if a couple of coats of paint will hide the plastic-ness.  All other options will quintuple my cost (yep, just wanted to use the word ‘quintuple,’ but it’s true - five times more expensive to go most any other route).