Beating Traffic

For some reason, a veritable apocalypse of cultural events conspired to occur this weekend. A good weekend to stay home and not try to drive anywhere.

And, well, somewhere close to 2000 bulbs arrived from Holland for fall planting.

Which necessitated the purchase of the ground auger. Is this a worthwhile purchase? Yes. Digging the holes for bulbs was faster and easier even in our soft, collapsing sand (think dry beach sand and that is our garden at this time of year). A million times better than digging them out with a trowel or bulb planter. If you are dithering over one of these, go for it. (Mine was $20 from Orchard Supply Hardware; I did not shop around, so I have no idea if that was a great price, but it has been totally worth the whole $20 already.)

Where we were planting smaller bulbs that don't need to be as far down, we used the trowel (or the fine new Hori Hori that George gave us as a thank you after his last visit, because he's that kind of house guest). I like to lay them out first, so I make sure I'm not putting them too close and that there's a good mix of types (these are muscari and species crocus along the front walk).

In the afternoon, our friends Kate and Tim (and George) came over and helped us out. Well, Kate helped me with the bulb planting, while Tim helped Noel with this:

Before Kate and Tim arrived, Noel got up on the ladder and stripped a bunch of paint off the trim on the inside of the bathroom door. You may recall that the upstairs bathroom is being divided into a hallway to the cat room/attic and a smaller bathroom. This doorway will be the entrance to the hallway, not a doorway, and we will use the door pieces for the bathroom part.

The transom window had been pretty well painted-in there, but with some paint stripping on the trim, Noel was able to pry off the boards holding it in place.

With the transom window out, Noel took down the trim to get ready to build a new wall.

While Noel was stripping wood, Tim moved the enormous pile of lumber Noel had picked up earlier in the day into the house.

Then I'm not sure what happened because I was outside drilling enormous holes in the ground with Kate, but we came inside and there was part of a wall there.

Like, for real a wall. This wall has such a large opening because the bathroom will have a pocket door (always nice when space is tight). We got a pocket door kit a while back and will be using the old bathroom door, once it is not so pink. I need to order another kit for downstairs, because a swing door makes even less sense there (though I could make it work).

I still have a LOT of bulbs to plant: I had to weed before planting today so I got a late start. That's going to keep me from being much help to Noel with finishing up this framing tomorrow. But it's good to have a bit of a start on getting the bathroom framed in and ready to have tile backer board put up. Mostly because winter is coming and if you look above Noel's head in that last photo you can see outside the house through the siding, so we'd like very much to get things closed up and less prone to leaking than they are now.

posted by ayse on 10/06/12