No?
Very well. Then let's proceed to a post I like to subtitle, "In which we do horrible things to vegetation"...
One of the things we really like about living in Broadmead (as opposed to, for example, across the street from Victoria's largest mall) is how much greener and fresher and cleaner everything is. Broadmead has a real (and deserved) reputation as being somewhat dark and dank due to all the enormous evergreens growing all over the place, but our street doesn't have that problem: we live on one of the brightest streets in the entire neighbourhood. So bright, in fact, that there are certain times of the year that I really wish we could figure out a way to block off the high windows in the front hall so that the early morning sun wouldn't stream RIGHT into the master bedroom... but I digress.
Of course, the sunny exposure leads to another problem of sorts: all of the plants in the yard, including the ones we aren't that fond of, tend to grow rather large. Case in point, the voluminous, overbearing, pest-infested, overly-phallic cedar shrub monstrosities on either side of the window at the front of the house.
As near as I can tell, the only actual benefit to having these things in our yard is so that we can locate our house from six miles away.
"Oh, sure! Hang a left off the Pat Bay, and just look for the giant green penises. You can't miss it."
Please excuse the picture - for some reason I had no shots of the front of the house at all, and had to use the one from the original listing. Well, I have this one, but it doesn't really capture the majesty of the two of them together, towering over the house like a couple cast-off sex toys for the Jolly Green Giant (too far? Yeah, too far):
The downsides include the way they darken the living room to the point where we feel like we're trapped in an old, scratchy, disused sauna, and the way they provide a highway straight into our attic for any four- or six-legged critter looking for a way to escape the wind and wet. Oh, and the fact that they're growing too close to the house and ruining both the stucco on that side, and the shingles on top of the little roof along the top of the window. Needless to say, we're not exactly fond of them, and decided pretty much as soon as we moved in that we'd be taking them out.
Well, last Thursday was the day. While we were at work, some guys showed up and cut them all down.
Awesome. Well, apart from the way the stucco is so much darker where the trees were sheltering it from the weather. Still: awesome.
Another area where the cedars were starting to make us feel a little hemmed in was in the back yard. There's a sort of patio area (and when I say "Sort of", I mean it has some gravel and a pathetic attempt at a flower bed - it's GOING to be a patio some day, but it's only pretending right now) in the back that's surrounded by a cedar hedge with a wrought-iron arbor in the middle - yes, like everything else in this house, it's all very twee.
Anyway, because no one in their right mind would ever take a picture of a cedar hedge (read: I never took one), here's another picture from the original listing:
Yeah, you get the idea. Anyway, when I first mentioned to the War Department that I was really looking forward to getting rid of those hedges, she looked at me askance and wondered why I ever thought we were taking them out at all. It took less than an hour for her to go from not even thinking about it to being unable to wait a second longer, and so I found myself roaring away at them with a chainsaw one sunny Sunday afternoon.
Being somewhat smaller hedges, they came out with no difficulty at all, and there was soon nothing left but the roots. Which is where it gets weird. You see, our neighbor is retired AND crazy. Well, he came over to offer us some scrap wood and we were showing him around a bit and showed him where the hedge used to be.
Well, he was so all fired up that he came over the next day, while we were at work, and spent forty minutes ripping up all the roots from the hedge. He said he was only going to work at it for an hour, but they all came out like butter, so he wound up doing them all.
And then he came back the next day and fixed the sprinkler pipe he cut through the first day so it was all good.
And here we are now, no roots, no hedges:
Looks much better, eh? Of course, we now have to take out a few yards of soil so we can level it off and put in pavers or flagstones or something, but it's already so much nicer. I could be wrong, but I think that huge red azalea is a big fan of the change, too...
Right then. It's now time for a new feature on this blog. Given that we're not really doing as much construction on this house (and I really am getting much better at working with tools), I haven't had much occasion to be making updates to everyone's favorite feature, The Injury Report (also known as Don Hurts Himself). Well, I figured that, in the spirit of this house, I'd try something new. It is thus with great pleasure that I introduce the latest Don and Amy's Broadmead Reno blog innovation...
This Week in Mayonnaise
Now, I'm sure all of our regular readers are familiar with the strange substance left all over this house by the previous owner, and which we have decided (rather arbitrarily) to call mayonnaise. But as a recap, so far on this blog we have seen mayonnaise used to patch drywall, fill holes, and serve as extra insulation for doorbell wires. But really, we've only just begun to plumb the depths of the possible uses of mayonnaise.
That being said, listing and showing them all in the same post would be prohibitive, so I thought I'd make it a sometime feature where I can post photographic evidence of this remarkable stuff, and encourage people to comment on whether they felt our old friend Frank was making good use of his magical substance.
For this inaugural edition, I present to you this lovely piece of ... whatever, hanging right on the wall of the garage, on the wall nearest the front door (meaning, you have to walk right past it every time you come in):
Leaving aside the aesthetics of the piece, I urge you to take note of the double duty being performed by the mystical mayo: sealant AND adhesive! It's a two-fer!
I think that's pretty damn impressive. Butt sucking ugly, but impressive.
Tune in next time for the long-awaited saga of the floor in the master bedroom. And probably the floor in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, too.
Yeah. We've done a lot of flooring.
