Secure and Yet Not Really

Apart from driving around town this morning stalking my neighbors, I spent today on a few disparate projects.

First, I began repairing some of the damaged drywall in the laundry room.

The deal is that when we first moved into the house we planned to put the main breaker in the laundry room, and to that end we busted a hole in the bottom of the wall, at which point we discovered that in fact the drywall was laid on sleepers over the siding on the back wall of the house. We are saving that siding as a secret stash of the stuff. So, the big hole at the bottom of the wall.

Then a couple of years ago we finally got fed up with the location of the light switch, which was, I kid you not, the middle hole there. This created a stupid situation in which we had to walk across the room and at the time over the cat box to turn the laundry light on, so we moved it over to right by the door, which is where the light for the bathroom had been, only we finally moved that one to inside the bathroom earlier that year, utterly ruining a great practical joke to play on our friends at parties.

I don't remember what the upper hole was, but it was likely something stupid. Now it is partially patched.

The thing about patching drywall is that you put the patch on, mud it a little, then you have to wait for it to dry before you can do anything. So it's not like I could spend all afternoon doing this.

So I went downstairs and measured the water coming into the basement, which clocked in at 1 gallon/minute. That certainly makes me feel a bit more strongly about installing the battery backup for the sump pump, I can tell you. I have more on why I care about the water flow in another post.

That done, and the afternoon stretching before me like an endless wasteland, or at least a couple of hours of free time, I decided it was time to actually attach the arbor to the ground so it doesn't blow over on somebody walking by. Just an idea I had.

I used four fence stakes from my stash of random garden supplies, drove them into the ground, and attached the arbor to them with screws. Worked good, and enabled me to level the arbor so it didn't look quite so perilous as it had just standing there, leaning slightly menacingly towards the sidewalk.

Yes, we do have random piles of cruddy broken bricks and chunks of concrete and rocks all over the place. But at least we have the grace to be embarrassed by them, even if we can't seem to get them all cleaned up.

At the same time I moved the Constance Spry rose over closer to the arbor, so it would grow more upright. In theory that will give me more room in the rose bed to spread roses out, but seriously, I am not going to dig up and move all those roses right now.

If you're wondering what classy method I used to keep the soil from tumbling out onto the sidewalk, I must say that I outdid myself. I busted up an old shadow box from a failed art project and stacked the pieces there. Yes, we are all about class here today.

In other news, yesterday evening I staked the experimental grapes that were large enough to need stakes. And I noted that some of the smaller ones need to be repotted into larger pots.

For those of you wondering what the heck the experimental grapes are, I started the story on my other blog. The story begins here, then continues here, with another update here, and repotting here, an ominous growth here, and finally another repotting here. We've only had four outright losses in the seedlings so far.

Technorati Tags: gardening, landscaping, plants, roses

posted by ayse on 03/22/06