Rehabber’s Rehab

It has been a cold winter here in Chi-town, but things have been warming up quite a bit the past few days.  The snow that has been on the ground since the end of December is finally starting to melt.  The giant, and quite impressive snow fort down the block has melted to a foot high ring.  As a child who grew up in Texas, where on the few occasions it snowed you were happy to be able to gather all of the snow up in the yard into one basketball sized half grass half snow-ball, I was particularly amazed by this 5 foot high fort with foot inch thick walls all the way around.  I am sad to see it go, although the relief I feel at finally having a break from the bitter cold, is tempered by the fact that the snow that is remaining is over a month old, and thus disgustingly dirty.  It has also revealed a ton of trash that has been hidden behind snow banks for the past month, and is now littering the streets.  Our back yard in particular is no exception.

For the past month we had been able to delude ourselves into thinking that it was not that bad.  We had forgotten about all of the construction debri that was hidden underneath.  The yard is now slowly being revealed as things slowly warm up, and all of the garbage is starting to come to light again.  What a mess.

This past Sunday was likely part of the last great beautiful weekends for the year here in Chicagoland (if you ignore the Bear’s spirit crushing loss).  Knowing we had better enjoy it while we can, after Thor woke up at noon after working all night, we had an awsome brunch at a place with a beautiful outdoor patio, and then I got to work out in the garage on our bedroom door - more about that later, probably when I finish up on Tuesday (I hope).  Meanwhile Thor took a nap and watched the game.

Once nap time was over we were able to get to work on my real goal for the weekend, which was to start to clear out the pine bushes from the yard, particularly the front.  As you may know, I’ve had my eye on that bush from the very beginning, and this weekend it’s time had finally come.  I want to get the front ready so that come spring I can just go out there and plant, and I am not trying to dig up bushes and rocks in the cold and half-frozen ground.

Thor set about sawizawing the giant bush down while I started picking up the white rocks.  Yes, those white landscaping rocks were basically covering the entire front planting bed underneath the bush.  I am cursed, they seem to follow me everywhere.  I spent about 2 years getting rid of them from the Rice Street house, and now they have found me again.  There is no easy way to scoop them up, they are everywhere, make it hard to dig, and most importantly they are so very very ugly.  If anyone wants some, however, just send us an e-mail.  I have about 8 buckets for you.  Thor is annoyed because it has just created more trash for us to start trying to get rid of.  In the end I created a make-shift sieve using a doormat hung across two buckets to try and shovel out the rocks from the dirt.  It did a pretty good job, but was also more time consuming.  Once it started to get dark out I just gave up, and there is definitely at least 3 buckets worth left in the planting bed still. (more…)

I am going to continue my personal vendetta against pine bushes and begin gardening by ripping up the bush in front of the house immediately.  Although I admit, on occasion pine bushes can be done well, in general they are horrible.  Horrible.  People just seem to plant them and and then let them be, until they get scraggly, have no form, dead branches hanging every where.  Just because you plant a pine bush doesn’t mean you never have to take care of it!! Low maintenance is not no maintenance.

After the pine bush is gone, I think that we are going to kill all the grass over the winter and turn the entire front yard into a planting bed.  The yard itself is only about 20 x 7, so half of it is take up by the current planting bed anyway, and I don’t see any point in lugging the lawn mower up front to mow two strips of grass. (more…)