here is the house...

Tilin’ and Grillin’ (though not necessarily at the same time)

So the gods of self leveling concrete were not smiling upon us last week. All that work we did on Sunday to level out the patio area was for naught when we got 3 straight days of solid and driving raining starting just a couple of hours after the concrete was poured. All that heavy rain pounding and sitting on the concrete made it sink a bit in the middle. Technically it should have even by dry at that point and able to withstand the rain but one of two things went wrong. Or both things went wrong…who knows. First off there was crazy high humidity last Sunday cause of all that impending rain so that definitely affected the drying time. Also, we checked the manufacturers website who makes the self leveling concrete and they said even though the bag says to use it within a year of purchase, that they recommend using it within six month because it has an active ingredient that stops working after a while and often the stores don't rotate their stock. Our bag was 9 months old but might have been sitting on the self at Home Depot longer. We had another old bag but decided to throw it away and go to Home Depot on Thursday night to buy a new bag. They Friday night after work we poured the new bag of self leveling concrete and smoothed it all out so it would be ready for tiling first thing on Saturday.

Also Friday night we had our inaugural grilling session, completely with filet mignon au poivre, grilled potatoes with homemade herb/parmesan butter and string beans baked with garlic, olive oil, lemon zest and roasted hazelnuts…it was delicious! I would say the steak was 97% perfect. It was a tad on the medium rare side but still tasty. We just need to let the internal temperature on the thermometers go a couple of degrees higher next time and it will be perfect.

Today, Saturday, it's 85 degrees here in New York. Pretty much the first day of summer and everyone is acting accordingly. We spent the whole day working outside and taking advantage of a few nice days in a row. It's actually supposed to be 88 tomorrow! Maybe it's time to take the covers off the AC units…hmmm. So we inspected our concrete and all looked good. We used my handy mosaic guide to map out the mosaic first so we could get a feel for doing it with actual tiles. The job would have been much easier with the same sized tiles, but I think this will look much nicer in the long run. When all the prep was done we snapped out our first chalk like to start off of.

Here's the slate tile close up next to the side walls we painted last weekend:

Then it was time to mix mortar and start tiling. The space was too tight for both of us to work in right now so Eric got to tiling and I got to fixing up our blue front door.

The blue front door is powder coated steel which means the paint is baked into the steel which is supposed to make it last longer and keep it more impervious to scratches and the like. However the door has taken quite a beating over the last few months with two tenants moving out and another two moving it. Also, Eric accidently wiped off the door with a rag that has some Goof-Off on it and it took off some of the paint finish. So we needed to repaint the whole thing just to get a baseline back. I worked with Alex to get the best match on the paint as possible, and got some recommendations from the paint store around the corner on how to repaint powder coated steel. It's not as straight-forward as you might think. First I had to sand scuff the surface down a bit to prep it for receiving paint. Then I had to prime it with a primer designed for metal. I used our existing Rustoleum Rusty Metal primer since we still have a few quarts of this from painting all the radiators. This is the front of the door taped up and primed.

As people were walking by and seeing me paint the door I could tell they weren't happy. Not everyone likes the design of our house but the blue door is pretty much universally loved. They got their wish a few hours later when I sanded the door again and then applied the first coat of the blue paint. And then it got interesting. The paint is not really paint at all; it's a Polyurethane enamel which means it has the consistency of part oatmeal, part glue. It was a pain to work with. And every little imperfection shows in it. It was so sticky it was pulling all the fibers out of my paint brush and bits of cotton off my roller. I kept picking these pieces out with my nails which was a big mistake. Once the first coat was done I needed to give it 4-6 hours to be dry to the touch but I couldn't apply the second coat for 12 hours. And I have to apply a second coat within 24 hours for it to bond properly so that is on the agenda for tomorrow. However it took me longer to get the paint off my hands and nails then it did to actually paint the door. This stuff is lethal! Tomorrow I am wearing gloves and using pliers to get any stray brush or roller pieces. Pics of the new blue door to come tomorrow.

While I was working on the door and taking the top few layers off my skin to get the paint off, this is what Eric was doing:

This is what Monk was doing

Eric got about 90% of the floor tiled today so he is confident he can do the rest plus the ledges and stairs tomorrow. So no grouting this weekend but we can do that together and get it knocked out in a couple of hours, maybe even one night after work this week. We'll see. Now we are grilling again. Yum!

King of Dirt - Our episode

Here it is in all of it's mortifying glory.  Editting is truly an evil thing, as is the weight I gained before my abdominal surgery last fall.  Luckly most of that is gone already and things are much less stressful around here.  But if I ever need inspiration to hop on the treadmill, I can just watch this video!  It's too bad they left a lot of stuff out, there was some good little moments we filmed that must have ended up on the cutting room floor.  I was afraid the editting would make us look like dopes, but I would say on the dope scale of 1-10 we are only about a 5, which is better than I expected.  Regardless, we got a great yard.  Not sure why they have the budget so high, we didn't spend nearly that much, but I guess without all the material discounts it would have been closer to that--I would have thought higher actually.  Oh well.   In the end even though I'm not exactly thrilled to watch myself from last year on video, I would do it all again cause we love and backyard and Gino was great to work with (even though he kept calling me "Daner" and his brother Ralph kept referring to me as "da lady!"--haha)

Look closely and you can see Maui a couple of times (in the shot from our kitchen looking at our stairs they kept using to show the inside) and Monk (on the balcony in the sunroom in the shot they kept using to show the before status of our yard)

TIP - Make sure to click on the HD button in the bottom right corner of the YouTube player to view in HD

King of Dirt - Oasis in a Tiny Backyard Part 1

 

King of Dirt - Oasis in a Tiny Backyard Part 2

Sunday Work-day (and people say weekends are restful?)

There was no way we could tile today, there just wasn't enough time, so we made sure we have absolutely everything done to prepare for tiling. This included painting the vertical sections in the front patio the same stucco paint gray/blue color as the front of the house then using a concrete bonding agent on the sections where we needed to pour the self-leveling concrete. Both of these things are illustrated in this photo, which kinda looks like an ad for Rigid/Home Depot (seriously they should pay me and be our sponsor)

The concrete bonding agent acts like a glue when pouring new concrete over old concrete. We have this issue because they old contractor didn't use any type of bonding agent. They had the front patio concrete poured and then adjust the pitch a few weeks later with a skim coat of concrete but with no sealer. Thus that skim coat is what is breaking up and powdering off. Their pitch was off too, so in this instance they were 0 for 2—which is nothing new.

Then we mixed up a batch of self-leveling concrete and poured it over the broken sections. We evened it out and tried adjusting the pitch a bit more so that water wouldn't pool at the bottom of the steps and would hopefully move towards the drain. We can adjust this further with the mortar and tile, but this was a good foundation.

So now, all ready for tiling first thing next Saturday, assuming the weather is nice again next weekend.

Out back we finished up the grill and tested it out with the propane tank from our outdoor heater—all systems go!

Four days in a row of beautiful weather has done wonders for our weeping birch, which was barely budding last week and now is looking pretty green. It even had some long, cylindrical pods, some catkins which should bud in the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to see what those are going to look like cause right now it just looks like the tree is dripping with caterpillars.

Here is the aforementioned fountain looking barren with dead grass around it. Oh well, it sure sounds nice! Next time we have some free time (whenever that is!) we'll clean up all that dead grass and re-mulch. I'm giving this grass until mid-may to come back or else I will rip it out and replant

Same thing for these grasses, they are supposed to come back but so far just look like straw. Patience, I know…

Doing nicely are the meadow sages (or at least I think they are meadow sages) they were looking pretty dead up until a few days ago. I trimmed back all the dead part and now some green is sprouting. These will have tall branches with little purple flowers. Also the Creeping Euonymus' are looking much greener over the last few days and those coral bells with the purplish/reddish leaves behind them are starting to look a bit more alive:

So while we didn't get to everything we wanted to do this weekend, you couldn't say that we didn't work our asses off and get a lot accomplished. And now it is time to rest…

Saturday Work-day (aka, everything but the tile)

We woke up pretty early yesterday (which is no small feat for Eric) and got to working outside immediately. First order of business was to scrape off all the loose bits of concrete that have been powdering and flaking with each rain or snow storm since the original contractor never sealed the concrete. Here's what it looked like when we started:

This is looking out from the door under the stoop, out towards the hatch with the trash riser on the left

This is looking down over the railing from the sidewalk

Once everything was scrapped and swept it looked more like this:

And Eric spent a good hour powerwashing all the crevices and getting old the mold, moss and dirt off of all these surfaces to prep for the next steps. And that's where the plan hit a wall. After noon this area gets no more direct sunlight and even though it was about 75 degrees outside, the concrete was still moist well into the late afternoon and could not be worked on any more for the day. But never fear, we had plenty more to do.

Outside in the garden we pulled some more old, dead plants and gave all our live plants a heavy dose of miracle grow. Since it was sunny and mid-70's almost all the plants are looking perky and alive with the exception of all the grasses in the back corners. Then we moved the waterfall outside from its winter storage home, cleaned it out and spent a while situating it in the back corner of the yard. The pump on the waterfall is extremely finicky, as we would test it, arrange it and then fill it with water only to have it not work. Moving the waterfall with water in it is a herculean task and it you moved the thing a fraction of an inch in any way it didn't like, the pump would stop working. Finally we got it in the right place with the pump working. However, it looks a little barren and fake back there now with no grasses growing in around it (thus no photos yet). It's a bit early for grasses; we need to give the grass another couple of weeks to sprout in. If it doesn't come back we'll buy some new grasses and arrange around the waterfall to cover the gaps and breaks.

We also finished setting up the bench area with the cushion and new side table, which does a much better job of hiding all those AC lines than the planters did:

Along with the new cushions on the big chairs in the back, which make them infinitely more comfortable to sit on:

The painting arrived on Thursday, extremely well packed in 3 large trash bags full of peanuts, bubble wrap and paper, so we unpacked those and cleaned up all the mess from that. Our new lights for this area have not arrived yet and we don't want to hang the paintings until we can get the lights up and determine the right placement, so for now they are just sitting on the ledge below the wall.

The two on the left will be on top of the other two so you will see what looks like 5 wires stacked horizontally with birds on them. Again, this photo doesn't capture the texture or the old wood feel the painting have to them, but you can see they are pretty!

Around that time the grill arrived so we spent a few hours unpacking it and moving all the pieces to the back. Eric started grill construction at about 8 pm out back…in the dark. He worked on putting the frame together for about an hour before packing it in for the night. Photos to come.

On the agenda for today is pouring the self leveling concrete out in the front to get the pitch right for tiling. Also we will be painting all those side walls and these will not be getting tiled. If there is time I might start repainting the blue door in the front as there are plenty of scuff marks on it and we want to repaint before installing the kick plate. We'll finish up putting the grill together as well, hopefully. It doesn't look like we will even begin to start tiling today as the self leveling concrete needs overnight to dry properly. Plus there is rain in the forecast for the next few days so we don't want a half finished tile job to take that rain. Here's hoping next weekend is as nice as this one!

King of Dirt Video Embed Test

This is NOT our episode of King of Dirt; this is the previous week's episode in which Gino builds a patio around his wife's pool. I just wanted to test out the encoding and embedding process to see how it will look when we need to do this for our episode. However the technology gods and have conspired against me in this attempt. Our internet connection went down yesterday and while it did come back up a few hours later, there is something very wrong with our connection speeds which are crawling super slowly. Hopefully this will be fixed by Monday night as uploading these videos pretty much took all day with our current connection. I'm not super impressed with the quality but that might be Google videos as the local copy on my computer looks much better. I might play around with some different encoding settings later, but for now here's what I got:

UPDATE – network connection now fixed so I gave YouTube a try with the same files and the encoding seems much better to me, especially if you click on HD in the bottom right corner since these were encoded at 720p

King of Dirt - Episode 2 Part 1 - A Curving Patio for My Wife

King of Dirt - Episode 2 Part 2 - A Curving Patio for My Wife

Our 15 Minutes of Fame is Upon Us

Tons of amazing and nerve wracking stuff coming up on the horizon here at the house—I can barely contain myself!

First off, our backyard renovation show is currently on and I found out today our episode will air on Monday 4/20 at 9:30 PM EST on the DIY Network. DIY is basic cable and in NYC it's 145 on Time Warner but if you are outside of the area you can check out this site to see if you get DIY and what channel it is. I also plan on capturing the show from my DVR and re-encoding it so I can save it as an AVI file and post it online for people to see. This will require some trial and error, so hopefully I can make it happen! I'm nervous about the show, I wonder how much of the really cool work we did they can actually capture in such a short period of time. They filmed pretty much non-stop for 6 days and it all needs to be distilled and edited into about 22 minutes of footage—not sure how that will work. I'm also not looking forward to seeing my face on TV, mostly because while the show was being filmed there was some pretty heavy stuff going on with my family and I was also very ill and getting ready to have my scary cut-you-open surgery. I'm afraid this will show in my face and my eyes and I might look painfully…well…wrong. But maybe it will just serve as a reminder of how much better things are now and how much more positive I'm feeling these days. Either way I'm sure there will be some cringe-worthy moments. Not too much info on their website, but here is the link about the series. Our episode is called "Oasis in a Tiny Backyard"—not very original, but certainly to the point.

What else? Well, we commissioned some artwork to go on our big, blank wall over the stairwell. I found out today that the pieces shipped and should be arriving on Thursday. Very exciting—can't wait to see them. It is 4 panels that will work together to create a whole piece that is about 48 inches wide by 64 inches tall. It's hard to see in the photo I have below, but these pieces are done on reclaimed wood so there is a lot of depth and texture. As a reminder, this is the wall they are going on (taken from behind the glass wall so excuse the glare)

We ordered some new light fixtures to go on either side of the paintings using those existing install points that current just have bare bulbs (with one blown out—oops) In fairness, Alex borrowed our tall ladder and we can't even reach that light until we have it back. He's supposed to bring it back shortly at which point we can hang the painting and later install the new light fixtures.

And here is a photo of the 4 panels that the artist sent me from her studio…before applying the glaze to the pieces so they will have a slightly different look when we get them, but you get the idea…

Also on the horizon, this Friday our new grill is supposed to be delivered in all of its cooper glory. I have never in my life owned a grill, my parents had one growing up and I can remembering them digging a path to the grill in the snow and using it even in the most awful of weather—funny memories! Personally I'm excited to make salmon and not have the whole house smell like fish afterwards for 3 days. Ah, the possibilities!

Also, we got our blue slate tile deliver last Saturday for the front patio area so we have all the supplies we need for that—the tile looks beautiful! However it rained all day on Saturday and Sunday we have Easter/family stuff to do so we weren't able to get to any tiling. Cooped up inside, I did manage to graph the whole area and design a mosaic pattern for the 3 different tile sizes we have (12x12, 12x6 and 6x6) It didn't scan too well cause it's a couple of pieces of graph paper put together and it's hard to tell where elevations change in the scan, but here is the basic idea.

This is the first time we will be attempting to do anything other than laying the same size tile down so it seemed like a good idea to map it all out on paper first. We might just do full 12x12 tiles on the steps instead of the mosaic—it just depends on what size tiles we have left by the time we get up there. The good new is that the weather is set to be nice both days this weekend, so unless that changes we plan on spending both days working on this. On Saturday we need to scrape off all the old, flakey concrete, power wash the area, pour the self-leveling concrete to even out the pitch and paint the sides on the elevations since we won't be tiling any of the vertical jogs. If we can make that all happen in one day we can actually starting laying down tile on Sunday—very exciting! This is the last big home project left so hopefully it will go smoothly…stay tuned…

Backyarding and Frontyarding

On the eve of the premier of King of Dirt we decided to do some backyard fixing up ourselves. The backyard had become a very large litter box for the neighborhood feral cats which are feed by the people who live in the old age home behind us. The cats would come into our yard and have kittens inside our old vent hole that still had some space for them to get into. There was cat poop around the entire perimeter of the stone area from months and months of disregard over the winter, but with the temperatures getting warmer and spring upon us I was time to take a 3 pronged approach to getting the cats out of the yard. First we cleaned up all that poop and scrubbed down the tile so there was so scent to attract additional cats. Second we finally covered that old vent hole for good so the cats don't have a nice warm place to get into. And finally we bought an ultrasonic, motion detector cat deterrent called CatStop which evidently makes a sound that cats don't like and promises to keep them out of yards for good. I was a bit skeptical about the last one but after a week of having it installed I'm please yet astonished to announce that there are no more cats in the yard—amazing!

Here is the CatStop in action in one of our planter where the pansies from last year are re-growing and the mums not re-growing…

But in an effort to hide that low concrete wall and A/C unit lines and hardware we moved those planters away and replaced the old mums from last year on the round planter with 2 new 3 foot tall arborvitae trees we picked up at Home Depot on the cheap—they will grow up big and fast and give us more coverage soon. We also moved the acacia bench we bought over the winter outside finally where it was always meant to go—the cats are very upset as they got used to it being inside but they will just have to get over it. I also bought a matching side table to go the right on the bench that should be delivered Monday. We put the long planter along the wall for now but they will probably find another home elsewhere at a later date. But for now Eric models the new setup which much more A/C hardware camouflage:

We were planning on buying a grill for the backyard this weekend but that was pushed off by the pressing need to get the front yard finished once and for all. You see, the front patio area was done with poured concrete which was never finished in any way. So literally every time it rains the concrete powders and cracks and gatherings in the drains, thus clogging the drains up and leading to flooding issues. Ironically last Sunday Eric and I were discussing the front patio over dinner and I mentioned that we might want to call the draining cleaning service to proactively come out and snake out that drain now that we were going into rainy season. Eric said he thought the drains should be fine for now. About an hour later it started pouring and of course the drains clogged completely. Eric was out there with his hand snake and some drain-o was unable to get it moving. On Tuesday we have Python Drains come out with an auger to clear it up and figure that would buy us some time. But then again on Friday it poured like crazy and the drain clogged up again with powdered concrete—fun times:

Luckily the inside drain was clear so we just let the water flow in and drain that way but still this is no way to live. The solution to this issue is definitely the tile over this concrete area ASAP. We have been struggling to find the right tile but we finally just picked something and ordered it for deliver next Saturday.

Here is the tile—real blue slate from Classic Tile in Bay Ridge. We got the mix of 12x12, 6x12 and 6x6 to make a mosaic pattern sorta like this one below. We will probably do no grout line and just butt the tile up against one another if we can make it work. We spent a little more than we wanted to, about $7 per square foot but we are saving tons of money by doing the install ourselves and they are going to deliver it for free so it's not too bad. This will look a lot nicer than any other option we saw so it was worth a little extra cash up front. And it should really help resolve our drain issues out there once at for all…let's hope anyway…

And just for tantalizing, coopery goodness….this is the grill we are planning on buying for the backyard in the next couple of week…once tax returns are secure and front patio is done we will reward ourselves with this beauty and finally get to grilling!