Refreshing Refurbishment

Let's face it, there's nothing refreshing about refurbishment while you're doing it.  What was I thinking?  Who came up with that title anyway?  It's more like hell while you're doing it.  But it is very refreshing once it's done, it's a brand new home zone.  One sweet sumptuous retreat.  A pleasingly unique boutique.  A new pastel of your favorite vision of paradise, or Shangri-la, even if it's just new lino in the hall bathroom.

Getting from point A to B was a home making marathon, or a really mean spirited musical ballet, depending on what's playing on the music box.  I mean, everything being done had to be choreographed according to who, what, when, where and pant size.  And then there was the massive parade of must be dones before we moved in.  Maybe those are the same things.  Or was that the sub-contractors in tights with tool belts and steel-toed boots, working to some rhythm of La Boheme that had to be choreographed?   Or maybe it could have been "La Bayadere Remodelair", or "Midsummer's Night Dream Paint Job", or "Don Quixote, Designer to the Stars".

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we recently bought our current home via a short sale coming up on two years.  It's been a whirlwind.  And I just got back from the Doc and am supposed to be sidelined for six weeks.  It's wood bucking and splitting time.  I've got about six cords of wood that need to be all that plus get stacked for winter.  Not sure how this is gonna work, but I'm thinking an improvised plastic bag tied up over the boot.  Or a noose around the neck.  Whichever is less painful.

I've got an Achilles tendon problem with my right leg, it has been a problem for over four months, ever since I hurt my back working on Chicken Fantasia Land.  This homesteading stuff is not for the faint of heart, or weak of spirit.  Or older of body apparently.

So I am in this knee high strap on boot thing, a Cam-Cast I believe it's called, which isn't sensual by any stretch of a tendon and essentially doesn't allow any achilles tendon stretching either.  I think.  I have been over-stretching it daily, I mean, we're on a hill here.  And I got big doins.   Up and down.  Side and out.  

                                                                    Das Boot

So, before I went off on my ranting whine, we bought this place on a short sale two years ago.  As a short sale goes, the house was not in terrible condition.  It had suffered pretty severe obsolescence, the previous homeowner was going through a divorce as well as having an upside down mortgage situation type thing.  I can see that after a while there would be less reason to continue to keep things up around the old ranch.

He left it probably as clean as he could, at least there was no debris.  Some of these places these days ARE TRASHED, with truck loads of garbage that needs to be hauled away before you can even see the floor. Or the front door for that matter.

We had done several walk throughs prior to close of escrow, and we also had all the appropriate inspections done as well.  The septic needed some work, but other than that there were no other potential MAJOR issues.  The well (for water) was fine and except for a couple of small hiccups and burps the electrical and plumbing was in good shape and up to code.  (The roof was in bad condition, but that was taken into consideration when making the offer.  We now have a new Lifetime comp roof along with new Leafguard rain gutters.  We get tons of leaves and pine needles around here and those gutters are the best you can get.  I'll never have to clean rain gutters again as long as we live here!)

The main issue with the house we had to contend with was aesthetics, which is fine and dandily daunting enough when taken into largesse.  We love the layout and the "bones" of the house (for the most part), but there were color and date issues abounding.

All the existing wall to wall carpet had to go and all the existing wallpaper had to disappear, to begin with.  And there was a lot of both.  Fixtures.  Appliances.  A tile floor.  A million other assorted odds and ends.  And then paint.  Top to bottom.  Every room, closet, nook and derriere.  We had a projected move in date less than two months away with twenty-five family members descending for Christmas seven days later.  Crazy?  Just a little.

On my mark, get set...Fortunately, we had done all this before.  Not all at one time, but in stages.  We've done some remodeling on every home we've ever owned, just not on such a massive scale and all at once.

My wife is an excellent interior decorator and has many fantastic ideas.  I gave up the interior decorating thing early on in our marriage, once I knew she had great taste and it wasn't all going to be unicorns and cowboys.  Or velvet nudes of penguins.  I was into rustic jungle paisley when we first met, so it was easy to slide into the contemporary sort of shabby chic she does so well.  Yeah, she's got good taste.

With her on the front line I took on the role of "Underbelly Guy" long ago.  I can do a fair amount of a lot of things around a house, not on par with my brother, who is a whiz at everything construction.  Or Bill O'Rielly, who is just a wizz.  I can get most things done with a B rating, sometimes flirting with an A-. 

So, as my adorable wife compiled a truck load of paint chips, fixture and cabinet hardware flyers along with about five thousand decorating magazines I began the demo.  She also began a weekly Sunday morning pilgrimage to Home Depot, which became our 2nd church of choice for a few months..  We also became online members of ConsumerReports.org so that we could have some trusted recommendations of a wide variety of home improvement purchases at our finger tips.

The first thing to come out was the carpeting.  Then the padding.  Then all them randomly whacked staples until I got a beautiful, ice skatingly perfectly level plywood sub-floor.  Then I ripped up all the cheap baseboard and piled all that up on the front deck for a bonfire later.  But not on the front deck.  The bonfire that is.

Meanwhile a professional painter was beginning on the kitchen while all the other commotion was going on.  My wife likes bright, and that meant paint the cabinets, which were of good quality and in good condition.  They just needed a face lift.  I paint pretty good, but I'd rather hire that out.  That's a fine, oil base spray after a ton of prep.  We used Chris Sgambati Painting in Grass Valley, and they did a FABULOUS job.  Here's a before:

And an after:

Brighter!

Also in this picture are new appliance additions.  The oven to the front left, dishwasher on the very far right, and new light fixtures on the ceiling.  There's new cabinet hardware, which adds up when you're replacing a kitchen full.  That butcher block island was a garage sale find by my sister.  A deal and steal and it works perfectly for our needs.

And then there's "Hal", the most massive microwave we've ever owned, front and center there.  It talks to you.  Can you hear him?  I can.  He can take your temperature.  Give you a bath.  Massage your temples if you have a headache.

You could fit an entire housing project in Hal's bowels, or maybe a half a moose.  You could probably get a half a moose in there.  Maybe.  If you cut it up and stuff.  Got rid of the antler.  That would help a lot.

The place did not have a built-in microwave, so another one of those quick choreographed things for me to do was tear out that little cabinet directly over the range.  Once that was out, the painters were turned loose in there.  Well, I also had to remove another cabinet to the left of the main fridge so we could add a mini "wine" fridge.  THEN the painters were turned loose while I ambled elsewhere.

Another initial project was removing built-in book cases from the living room.  Some folks might like 'em, and we do too, only not in the living room.  One now sits in the sun room, actually right on the other side of the wall from where it was brutally removed.  The other is in the garage.  This action brought us a "cleaner" environment as well as a few more square feet.

The photo below shows one book case.  The other was to the left of the french doors, which are directly to the left of the bookcase below. 

They came off the wall pretty easily.  Things usually do if you have a big enough hammer and use enough C-4.

Our living and sun room furniture is currently a mish-mash from several different rooms that were purchased for an entirely different house many miles and several moons ago.  Until my wife gets a total "feel" for what the room requires, we've got a carnival of colors and vast array of styles.  A splash of unique Shabby Chic.   A little Classic Medieval Contemporary Norwegian Funk.  A little Neo-Classical Traditional Eclectic Swedish Art Deco.  A little Retro Goth.  A little Jetsons.  It works..for now.  

After the carpets and baseboard were removed, I spent a day mini-jack-hammering tile out of the garage entry/utility/hall/foyer type area.  Only about 250 square feet of it, but it killed me.

The last (and only major) time I jack hammered anything was a driveway at the last house we owned.  I did that a day after donating blood.  You know, after they tell you that you should avoid strenuous exercise for 72 hours.  There's a reason for that.  Stamina lasts for oh, a millisecond or so.  Then it's just real tough to trudge through anything.  But there was a timing issue and it had to be done.  The jack hammer thing that is.

My son in law and I chopped down a tree with an axe a couple hours after donating blood one time.  It was a lumberjack challenge thing.  My chain saw was in the shop and he wanted to be a lumberjack.  We hacked and we hewed and we huffed and we puffed but we got it in the end.


Part of the tile came up like butter, but the other 245 square feet of it was inches at a time.  Hours.  It took me hours to tear it all up!  It makes me tired just thinking about the physical exertion, the clouds of dust, the freaking loudness of a jackhammer in an enclosed space.  Even with ear protection x2, foam in and headband out.  It was way louder than the front row at a Stones show or an indoor alcohol fuel infested tractor pull..

Next on the demo adgenda was the existing wallpaper, which had to go one way or another.  Back in my impetuous beer drinking youth I once helped a friend remove wallpaper from a small home he was renting.  Seven layers worth.  A lot of work for a rental, but he did stay there for five years.  Some guys played billiards when they drank beer, we removed wallpaper.  What were we thinking?  There was probably weed involved too.  As a bribe you know.  As a matter of fact, I'm sure of it.

I removed the wallpaper in the bathrooms, all three of 'em.  I am no stranger to this, and was prepared for a tough job, but it actually came off pretty easily.  It was a huge mess of course, and the clean-up probably took more time than the actual removal.  I used one of these little gizmo's, a Zinsser scoring tool, which scores the paper first.  Then I hit it with a stripper, like Zinsser, but NOT a stripper like Carol Doda , because if she showed up nobody would get anything done.   We'd all be helping with her wheel chair and stuff.

So anyway, I let the stripper soak for a while.  I mean the warm bath water apparently really helped her aching muscles.  It also dissolved the wallpaper glue, so that most of the paper peeled off like a St Bernard after a snow bunny in a blizzard, or Carol Doda's lingerie forty-seven years ago.   It takes her a littler longer these days. 

There was also wallpaper in the hall and dining room.  Rather than removing it, I painted over it with an oil based primer, paying special attention to the edges and seams.  After that we simply painted the latex color of choice over the primed wallpaper.  A word of caution when working with that oil based stuff, have a lot of ventalition and use a good mask.  Or, if you'd rather have the circus come to town inhale freely and frequently.  What did the first painters do besides go mad?

Here's the before and after of the dining room:

That chandelier was an estate sale find by my lovely bride.  We had to reinforce the bar the electric box is on up in the attic.  Another one of those immediate unforseen yet highly important improvements.  It's now so strong monkeys can swing from it and we won't have to worry about them falling into your soup.  If you were invited over for dinner for instance.

Once the basic demo was complete I rented an airless sprayer and hit the garage, ceilings and all the closets of the entire house with a round of essential white.  I had done the basic prep the day before and spent a day on the shoot.  I was then able to stage everything in the garage and closets and continued with the preparation of the rest of the house for paint.

This included all light and electric fixture removal (including all face plates-which were replaced) and spackling all cracks, holes, crevasses and ravines.  (This of course had been part of my initial "closet" prep.)  This also meant going all around the door and window trim.  I'm a stickler for no visible lines around trim, although I do like tan lines around the trim of the feminine mystique.  I went through one hundred forty-four tubes of caulk when I did the exterior paint job on our last house.  It's a problem, I know.

Anyway, while all this demo stuff was going on my wife was running back and forth to hardware, appliance and flooring stores.  She was working as hard as I was, and that's why we make such a good team.  We went through Youngs Carpet One for our carpet and hardwood flooring.  We've known them for years, and that's how a lot of stuff gets done in a small town.  Anyway, we were on their calendar for an early December installation, which was our prime time motivator.  With the holidays coming, we didn't want to miss our install window with them.

We were also both working full time jobs throughout this fun experience, which meant every spare waking moment was spent on the refurbishment.  We were even there together painting Thanksgiving morning.

And even as I kept a steady frantic pace I realized I wasn't going to be able to get it all done.  Our painter had a couple other jobs going, but he generously was able to fit us in to basically do the finish painting throughout the interior of the house.  They did it in a couple days.  It would have taken me at least twice that, if not longer.  And  I was able to continue with other pursuits.

Throughout and during all this painting, new electric lights and mirrors were being installed in the bathrooms  and new lights and two new ceiling fans were being installed in the foyer and living room.  We also installed all the new appliances in the kitchen.

We didn't put in a new range.  It is a gas range top, and is aesthetically and functionally fine.  We will eventually replace it down the line because our current oven is kinda small.  We didn't realize this until we had to special order it.  It was either that or start replacing cabinets, which gets expensive quick.   Another one of those really tweaky things about the house.  Maybe the people that built the place never had to roast a 240 pound turkey.

So, rather than redoing all the kitchen cabinetry just to get a right size oven, we're gonna eventually tear out the existing range (and cabinet housing) and put in a free standing oven and range.  That will give us the double oven capacity we need every once in a while and not cost us too darn much money.  We'll just have to figure out what to do with all the pots and pans. 

And then there was "Hal", the largest microwave we've ever known.  He was an incredible challenge to install, even with the help of a dear friend who is also a part time electrician and general all purpose handy man.   We had to do some wrangling and dangling to get him in place, but the wall will now have to come down to get  Hal down!  Come to think of it, he's kind of integrated himself throughout the entire house now.  It's like this is his house now, and we gotta do stuff for him.  I feel like I should be living on Elm Street.  Help, somebody get me out of this sci-fi horror movie.  Whew, where were we? 

Our house is kinda tri-level, with the main body on a foundation.  Then next to the garage and on a concrete slab is the guest room, utility annex, guest bath and pantry.  (That's the area I had to jack hammer.)  It's great in the summer because it always stays cool down there. ( I say down, it's only four steps up to the main level.)  But it also stays cool in the winter, and since there is house above it and concrete below the forced air does not have any way to get into that area.

The bathroom has a real nice ceiling heater, which many guests mistake for a fan.  It can get real hot in there real quick when its 95 degrees outside!  And then there is an electric wall heater in the bedroom.  It is now correctly installed on a "long" wall, rather than a short one.

You see, it all had to do with our guest bed, which is a real nice queen.  Not Freddie Mercury, who was a real flamboyant queen.  There was only one wall where the bed would fit, and unfortunately that was the wall the heater was installed on.  So...I took the heater off the wall (after ensuring the power was off to the dandy devil) and disconnected all the fittings.  Then, as exquisitely as possible, I cut a line in the sheet rock and removed it all about twelve inches above the floor.   This went on for about six feet along on one wall and another five or so on the other.  With the studs now open I drilled one inch holes through about all six or eight or forty-nine of them to allow for the 220 amp wire to be run.  I encountered some concrete foundation in the corner, so we had to razzle dazzle a little up and over and around to accommodate that unforeseen uncertainty.

My electric friend put all the connections together and once the wire was run and the heater connected I replaced all the removed sheet rock.  Taped.  Textured.  Painted. Giddy-up.

All this fun and frolic bled from days into weeks, with stuff slowing evolving and getting done.  I also had to spend a couple days helping on the septic system as well as sundry assorted things on the exterior, one notably was the cliff, which will be the subject of my next post.  

Once the paint was complete the new flooring was brought in.  That was a couple week project for the professionals.  The carpeting only took a couple days, but the new hardwood was about a week and a half.   And about a week after that, somewhere around December 16th we moved in.  Seven days later family descended for the holidays.  It was sheer and utter chaos, just the way I apparently thrive.  But we were in!

The baseboard came about one year later in two stages.  It's one of those things that's really missed when it's not there, but it's not really noticed that much once it's up.  The first stage was right before our second Christmas here.  I did all the downstairs (except for the utility and guest areas) as well as the upstairs landing.  A couple months later I did the guest room and utility area as well as the master bedroom.  There are only two rooms left to do, my office and my wife's library, or the other guest room. Those two will fall this winter.

Another initial priority was putting some window film on our west facing living room windows.  We fried a two thousand dollar sofa with sun damage in Monterey and I won't let that happen again.  And then when we moved some good furniture into the sun room I had to do all those windows too.  And then I weather proofed that darn room, eventually caulking and painting the tongue and groove ceiling as well as the rest of the room, which includes about eight windows.  Hell, the walls are all trim!  .  Am I a glutton or what?  But now, once my wife gets around to it, we have a just about ready room to go.  All we'll need to do is upgrade the floor.  And since it's an un-in-sulated addition (the sunroom) the flooring will be quite casual.

There will be ongoing upgrades as time moseys on, but the biggest push is through.  And the big thing that got me through this last move (five moves in five years) was that this will be the last move.  The kids will have to take all this crap out of here.  And we've got a lot of crap.  OK, probably a few good things as well.  Like my wife's porcelain and tea pot collection.  She's got to collect all these beautiful (and breakable) pieces which take up like four of the large china moving boxes when we were moving around.  I've been after her to collect stamps for years, especially because they would have all fit in a cigar box and I could have put them under the seat.

Paul Bunyan Update

Well, Paul and his Blue Ox never came by, but my brother-in-law did with his mondo wood splitter.  I was able to wrap up my cast with a plastic bag and pillow case, though by the end of my escapade they were pretty well thrashed.  Got to find something with canvass on the bottom.  Rubber clown shoes maybe.  Size 36 large.  You can see more wood pictures at Where's Paul Bunyan and his Big Blue Ox.

After

Before

Mister big stuff right there up there split like a wilted twig, or a musk melon cleaved with a butter knife.  He was no match for the Troy Built Hemi.  Took the first split right in the saddle, then kept slicing around.  Some of the larger rounds from an oak cut a year and a half ago were still wet. 

Bambi Can Eat My Drawers

Given, Marisa Tomei's mini tome on deer hunting from the movie "My Cousin Vinny" is hilarious, if only I could find the clip online.   She's so darn cute.  She is also a talented actor.  I don't agree with the script though.  At all.   There's been a few deer around here I would not have minded giving a "Pow" to between the eyes.

It's not about the meat.  I'm not a big fan of venison.  It's about the vegetables.  And the flowers.  And the bushes and little trees.  Those big friggin innocent "doe" eyes Ms. Tomei so eloquently refers to aren't full of oceans of puppy love, soft meadows and daffodils; they're full of assault, battery, home invasion, larceny and a host of other nefarious crimes.

Those friggin innocent doe eyes sneer as they eat the prize roses you've just spent weeks cultivating.
(I say weeks because if you live in a deer infested area any flowering rose will not last past sunset unless it is fenced or netted off.)  But let's just say you have a fenced yard and accidentally leave your gate open; A deer can decimate in seconds what it has taken you months and even years to cultivate and bloom.

They're kind of like a napalm bomb when they land upon a beautiful and flowering plant, shrub or tree.  Picture this; "You've just received a large, beautiful so-called deer resistant flowering hibiscus hybrid with over forty-one thousand blooms.  I mean, you could hide behind this thing if the cops were chasing you.  For instance.

And so you leave it out overnight, and Bambi and her derelict teen age son leave a skeleton shred of a stump of a thing behind.   It was as if an Armageddon like snow ball from hell descended and enveloped that beautiful, blooming Daughter to Mother birthday present in a holocaustic inferno.  Damn.  Holy Jesus.  Good God Almighty.  Shoot Howdy.   

They were like a swarm of ten thousand locusts descending.  The two of them.  Like Bonnie and Clyde on a hopped-up steroid and whiskey rampage.  Well, sort of.  You know, like if Bonnie was Clyde's mother and they were really hungry.  And vegetarian.   And having a very weird intimate relationship.  But then we're just going to total crazyville like Hitchcock did in Psycho.  Bananas in the shower will never be the same. 

OK, so what do I do?  We moved to the country.  There's wide open space all around us.  There's a big parcel on top and two (same size as us) couple acre parcels on either side.  Then there's the road.  It's a two lane paved country road, with a speed limit of 35 to 45 MPH.  Some folks zip as high as 50.  It can be a barn burner.  Directly across the street and at a couple of those o'clock things you use when you're referring to strategic locations are probably the same size as us parcels too.  Maybe.

I'm not giving up that much information.  There's stalkers out there.  Farm boy stalkers.  Kids of the corn. That sort of thing.  I gotta watch out for them.  And Zombies too.  The list goes on and on.  Ya, you know, I just checked my brain again. I probably got about ten thousand things I need watch out for.  Including the clowns and monkeys.  Cause when they come I gotta regroup. 

 There's a few neighbors over there across the street, and one of the kitty-corner-kinda-country-curvy-sorta straight line road ahead parcels is fenced to the road. I think.  That made no sense. 

Plus there's a donkey over there somewhere.  He brays now and then, which we find enchantingly amusing.   Somebody else has a few goats over yonder as well.  We hear them bleat now and again.  Our Rooster crows.  What a jolly little funny farm country sort of neighborhood we have.

So what's the point of all this jabber?  Deer need to get from here to there, or they apparently need to get somewhere at the very least.  Apparently there are too many obstacles, noodles and chatter across the street that has made them (the deer) establish a major thoroughfare parallel to the road and running across the front forty feet or so of all the properties on our side of it.  I'm OK with that.  It needs to be.

My overall landscaping and fencing design allows for that egress to continue as it should.  I just don't want them coming up the hill, attracted by the bouquet of some scent brought about by an aroma wafting upon the soft moonlit breeze and devouring everything I have lovingly tended like an army of ants on a day old dropped peach in the woods.  Or a hoard of Wal-Mart shoppers on that special shopping day.  If the plants were TVs for instance.  And we lived in Houston.  But I'm getting off track. 

Besides the established territorial trail across the front of the property, when we first moved here there was also a thoroughfare slicing right up the middle.  A big game boulevard.  Through the living room.  They'd camp out on the lawn.  Them and their buddies.  Then they'd come in the house and raid the fridge.  I addressed that scenario toot sweet.

First of all, the property came with plethora of extraneous fencing here and there, back and forth, hither and yon, running willy-nilly across the terrain.  It was all five foot high and originally designed to keep in goats.  There is one completely fenced in area in the top corner which I have retained for potential future use.  But after that you'd have to consult "Chicken Fantasia Land" to find out my theory of how the property was originally fenced.

The good part is that once it was "unhinged" from the T-Posts I probably had a couple hundred feet of fencing in good condition.  I also had a shoot-house-howdy bunch of T-Posts.  I ran the fencing all along the top of the property, meeting up with a very think batch of Manzanita.  Since the fence was only five feet high, I knew I would have to increase the height.  (Deer can easily jump six to seven feet and more, depending on their size.)   I scoured the internet for some sort of "T-Post Height Extender", but I found no such animal.  Or extender.

I devised my own three foot extender with one inch PVC and screws that didn't work worth a darn (even though some still remain).  I just couldn't get them secure enough to handle the barb wire stringing for the long haul.  

As I contemplated another solution, the pile of Manzanita poles I had set aside from previous clearing efforts began to do the hula in front of  me.  It was the weirdest thing.  And then they all got up and did this little boogie woogie.  A sort of hula boogie woogie, which I still can't figure out.  Anyway, about then I went Aha!

I attached Manzanita poles ranging in height from eight to twelve feet to the existing T-Posts and then strung the barb wire over, under, around and through..  We humans can barely tell it's there, but the deer can definitely see it.  It has elevated the existing fence by three to four feet, depending on the coil, so that the overall fence height is now between eight and ten feet tall.

Wrangling that barb wire was another story.  My son had recycled a bunch of coils in varying lengths from a friend's ranch, and it was all in a big pile like so many baked potatoes grazing in a herd.  Or rutabaga pies singing in a choir.  So many metaphorical choices, especially in this library.

OK, any fishing folks out there?  You know like when you're Tarpon fishing in the Bermuda Triangle and the line gets wrangled and tangled around your rod and reel, and then head and girlfriends ankles, then it spews out across the deck of the boat, over the side, gets caught up in the motor and the thing catches on fire so you gotta jump overboard and end up swimming to an island where all these people act like they are in a 1960's Sitcom.  And then you lose your new cashmere socks..

So, imagine that same whole experience only you're dealing with barbwire and you end up near some ranch in the Sierras.  Singing songs in a bar cause you're a showgirl.  No, wait a minute.  Wrong ranch.

When big, thick wire has been coiled up for a while, say a century or two, and it is uncoiled, it has this propensity to explode like an ever expanding semi-lethal web of unwieldy and surprising proportions.  And so on and so forth.  I think there were about twenty separate strands ranging from twenty to sixty feet in length.  That fun day shredded a flannel shirt as well as my favorite SF Giant T.  Just sliced right through the flannel to everything underneath.  What was I thinking?  I still have the Giants shirt.  It was my favorite.  There's so much skin showing through now that it looks like one of them chain mesh shirts a really cool redneck would wear.  Now I just need me a braided cord, tribal beach, bottle top pendant necklace.  For when I'm trying to impress the squirrels. 

The barbwire was much easier to handle once in separate strands, and all that wire has since been deployed across the top and sides of the property, effectively cutting off that major thoroughfare.  The deer have now been diverted to either side of us, which said land still remains in it's totally wild condition.  It doesn't seem the neighbors share our enthusiasm for horticulture.  Some folks just buy acreage so they can pee outside. 

Since that game trail was cut-off I would say the deer traffic has dropped by seventy percent.  There have been numerous breaches in the  "Braveheart" section(s) of the overall project though.  The "Braveheart" sections are where I have bolstered the already incredibly thick living Manzanita with dead stuff garnered from clearing our land. 

There is also barbwire strung along and through all this in the above picture.  It's all about six to ten feet high and thick.  The deer laughed.  They wagged their fannies at me as they sashayed through.

I have since added netting along the lower five feet.  At the present moment this seems to be holding.  I mean, it would be like jumping breast first onto a bunch of Manzanita Bungee sticks.

So for now we essentially have a horseshoe around the top of our property that has the deer effectively fenced out.  I still need to do the Manzanita pole elevation thing for a couple hundred feet along one side.  Then, once some downed trees are cleared, I have the materials to run about a hundred feet of fencing across the front to the drive.

On the other side I'm going to use the sloping lay of the land to my advantage, and will only have to use five foot fencing there.  With the steepness of the bank, it will be like twelve feet for entry.  On the other hand, if a deer gets in somehow after we're secure it will be an easy five foot jump for exit.  And believe me, Rover will be aggressively chasing Bambi so that the sneer in her eyes turns to fear.  Dang them deer.

The last step will be a solar powered automatic gate, which of course will be the subject of a future post.  We're a ways away yet on that.  It would be one thing if we had the money to just pay the man, but we don't, for the most part, so here I am doing it all.  Alone.  On a hill.  With a foolish grin.

But trust me, there is no freaking way I can be sitting perfectly still.  No way.  I figure I won't have a spare ten seconds for another decade.  It's some sort of metric thing I think.    

All this wrap around fencing will encompass about two of our two and a half acres.  The other half acre runs along the road and incorporates their existing native thoroughfare.  It is also split almost in two by our driveway, and eventually I have plans for both sides.

There is a bit of urgency on one side because I have relegated this area for an orchard.  (I plan on individually wrapping each tree with a small round fence while it is young.)  But first I need to down about fifteen scrub oak and pines.  I'm not sure if I can get that done by planting season early next year.  It's on the priority list, along with about fifteen other big things.  On the other side of the driveway, once cleared, I want to start a few Christmas trees.  There's room for about four hundred, but I'm gonna start with about ten.

But the priority is to get it cleaned up, slowly but surely.  It looks so much cleaner, plus it helps minimize wild fire danger.  I did get some daffodils down on either side of the drive last fall, and they bloomed well this last spring.  I will be adding more bulbs this fall.  Daffodils definitely appear to be on the do not eat list of deer.  They are prolific everywhere around Nevada County in early spring.

Once the perimeter is secure, we plan on getting a dog.  He'll have a nice secure territory to patrol.  In the meantime, what about all the rest of the hyperbole?   Put a search on deer repellents and you'll get about a zillion hits, which fortunately only about four hundred of 'em will make any sense.  The rest will be in a foreign language.  There's Liquid Fence,  there's Deer Out,  and there's Havhart Natural Repellents, just to name three. 

I have tried a couple different liquid commercial brands in the past.  The deer ate the shrubs and fabric the repellant was on first.  Then they finished off the tomatoes.  Had the roses for dessert.

Most of the liquid repellants out there contain some form of predator urine; like cougar, kangaroo or cobra.  Or maybe clown.  Normal human urine unfortunately does not seem to deter deer.  It deters coyotes, but it doesn't deter deer.  Dang. 

I know folks that have tried the motion activated sprinklers idea.  I have tried Nite Guard .  (Niteguard does state you have to move the unit around often to be successful with deer.  I am using Niteguard for other predators, and it is working well.)

I've hung bars of Irish Spring soap here and there.  Every once in a while you're wandering though the thick and you think you catch a whiff of a  Leprechaun.  So then you spend the next six hours looking for the little rascal cause who doesn't need three wishes or a pot of gold? And then there goes the day.  Maybe I should take that soap down...
   
The thing is, most all of these things will probably work for a while.  Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks.  Maybe a month or two.  But once the deer figure out no physical harm will come to them they cruise right on in.  Brazen as hell.  Once the scout is in, they're all in.  That scout has usually been a doe with one or two little freckled fawns around here the last two years.  Just like Ma Barker and her thieving gang. 

They also tend to get a bit braver as the summer rolls along, when the only moist green stuff is in our yard.  That's when they'll start to climb your deck stairs for your Geraniums.  During Winter, Spring and Autumn, even early summer they're not quite as invasive.  I mean, a prize rose is target 365 days a year.  But something that is supposedly deer resistant, like a hybrid hibiscus very well might bite the bullet in July, which my wife's did.   

The only things I know for sure that work are tall fencing and/or an aggressive dog.  I lived on some acreage in another life where we had a German Shepherd roaming freely.  Even though there was unfenced acreage for miles all around we had no deer problem.  He effectively patrolled a good three to five acre radius, even keeping coyotes at bay.

In a very odd sort of kind of coincidental type of cosmic thing, just as I was nearing completion of this essay,  "A Tail of Two Deer" happened upon me.  It is a story that will show you how important it is where you decide to live.  If you were a deer that is.  And I would have been remiss not to include this aspect of rural living.

My wife's folks live in the Almaden Valley, at the very south end of San Jose in the Silicon Valley.  It is a lovely area of upper middle class homes that in many areas abuts with ranch and wild lands, prime habitat for deer.

As a matter fact, on another one of those o'clock things across the street from their home is such habitat.  As a matter of fact, their front yard has been invaded many times, as have most homes in the neighborhood by those doe-eyed harbingers of herbal death.

Anyway, the other day Dad was in his front yard pulling some weed and watched as an automobile drove down the street. As the auto rolled at the speed limit, a deer from the hill approached the street.  The auto slowed, the deer hesitated.  The auto resumed, the deer bolted in front.  The auto tapped the deer, which hit the pavement.

The noise brought out the neighborhood.  The neighbors were in an uproar over the deer.  (The driver was OK.)  They wondered what to do.  They were about to hold the driver accountable for speeding and hitting the deer until Dad stepped in as a witness saying the driver did everything he could to not hit the deer.  They were about to call (on a Sunday) animal rescue for the poor little flea ridden parasite when it got up, looked around and fled back to it's habitat.  Don't know how much damage was done to the vehicle, but I do know this; He probably wasn't going more than 10-15 MPH, and I have tapped a deer at about 25 MPH.  My deer ran off and I ended up with some fur around my license plate.  That was about it.

My son (in my car) has hit a deer at about 45-50 MPH, resulting in some body damage and a broken left head light.   We now all have Deer Alerts installed on our cars.  They're not that expensive (under ten bucks) and at this point seem to be working.  We have noticed deer on the side of the road, but none have crossed in front of us since they have been installed.

Basically the deer alert is a little plastic whistle cone thing you install behind the grill of your car.  When you travel at 35MPH and higher it emits a sonic sound that keeps deer and other animals out of your path.  Along the same line as the high frequency dog whistles.  Or Steve Miller.  Or Boz Scaggs.  Maybe Niel Young howling on Like a Hurricane.

And then there was this deer on the road in front of our house yesterday.  I was down on the lower forty, working on brushing the multitude of trees our tree guy dropped last spring.  I actually got them all brushed, and will now be bucking and splitting about six cords of wood over the next couple months.  During a little break from the chain saw action, I heard some leaf rustling above and also across the driveway.

I'm pretty surprised at how quickly I have adapted to different noises around here.  It's pretty quiet around the neighborhood for the most part, and you can hear and pick up many sounds.  I have picked up the deer in the bush sound here, which is different than what squirrels sound like.  Or clowns.  Clowns in the forest are a dead giveaway with those big shoes.  And squirrels.  They're always chattering, like Chip and Dale.  Deer are deliberate, and move slowly, unless they're being chased.  By a clown for instance.

So I dismiss the deer above.  By the sound, I know he's up on the neighbor's forty.  I turn my attention to the one across the drive, and as I do I also hear an approaching vehicle.  By the way, I have absolutely no visual on this, it's a total audible for the moment!   So there's a rustle, then a quick tire screech and then a very loud Thwump!  I sat up alert, and as I was getting ready to mosey on down (although I had a pretty good idea of what had just transpired) I heard the vehicle engage.  Now mind you, I did not hear a door open at all.  Within ten seconds a mini van appeared with a somewhat portly elderly man behind the wheel.  The left headlight was gone and the entire front end of his van was toast.  He never even got out of the car.

I resumed working.  When my wife and I went over to some friends for dinner about six hours later we passed the deer, legs up on the side of the road.  Hopefully the county will be out to pick up the carcass on Tuesday, which is day after tomorrow.  Since it's a holiday weekend, we may have an opportunity to have some buzzards circling. 
 
It's pretty obvious I didn't care about the deer.  My only intention of going down there was to see if the driver was OK.  Obviously the driver didn't care, he didn't even get out of his car.  It's a big problem here.  Deer in the headlights that is.

If you hit a deer under 25 MPH, probably everybody (deer, you, passengers, car) is going to be OK.  If you're lucky, as a hunter/driver, you can always hope you bruised it's spleen as it wanders off.  As the speed increases, so does damage and danger.  The driver was probably doing 45 MPH yesterday, lethal for deer and van.

I was side-swiped by a buck one time when I was going about 60 MPH down the highway.  It just rambled down an embankment and ran right into the driver's side mirror.  Never saw it coming.  A couple grand in damages that time.  The deer did a Watusi rendition in the highway for a little while and then wandered off  the highway, presumably to die.  That was a wallop of a hit. 

There are mountain lions around.  Every once in a while you hear of a sighting.  But they really stay away from humans for the most part.  We have nothing to offer them, except for lambs and baby goats.  Them and coyotes are the only natural predators to deer around here.  Either the deer population is waaay up or these two natural predator's taste buds have grown fond of squab.  Or both.  I dunno.

The moral of "A Tail of Two Deer" is that deer in the Almaden Valley are much more appreciated by humans (for some reason) than deer in Nevada County.  So if you're gonna be one of those larcenous highway robbers, then maybe you should live in the Almaden Valley.  And if you insist in remaining here in Nevada County, know that soon this little plot of ground in your whole scheme of things is slowing becoming off limits to you and all of your ilk.  Enjoy the trespassing while you can, but soon the Geraniums on the front deck steps will be but a long lost generational memory.  And they will be happy and free to flourish unabated, as shall all flora and fauna here on our little isolated island in the hills.

There's a plethora of things you can try, but honestly, fencing them out is the only way, at least for me.

  

Where's Paul Bunyan and that Big Blue Ox?

In an amazing discovery of overwhelming and colossal proportions, like a cosmic variation of  jelly doughnuts and designer shoes, a primordial manifestation as old as time has become apparent right before my eyes.  

Just like when Pericles discovered he could not speak without a tongue.  Uh, throat.  No, maybe tongue.  Whatever.  Just like when Socrates discovered enemas.  I mean enigmas.  And Homer.  When he discovered Marge.  And what about Copernicus?  With all that heliocentric cosmetology stuff.   Ha!  Nothing compared to this.

I have discovered trees always get bigger when they have been chopped and hit the ground.  And in the abysmal despair of that discovery I have howled, "Where's Paul Bunyan and that Damn Blue Ox????"

There's been about fifty trees dropped since we moved here.  A few of those were little scrappy fledglings,  six to ten inches in diameter and twenty to thirty feet tall.   The majority had a good foot (or more) diameter trunk, all ranging from forty to seven hundred fifty feet tall.  See?  I told you they grew when they hit the ground.

About twenty of those were cut down by our tree guy.  The others have been dropped by myself, family and friends.  I have a standing order here: anyone that comes out and helps cut trees is taking home fifty percent of the firewood.  With oak around $300 per cord it's a worthwhile endeavor.  

Our tree guy is Phenomenal.  That's not his name.  That's his ability.  He has dropped big trees from the bottom (and top) and has not missed one yet.  In his late 30's, he still straps on his spurs and clambers up them beasts with the greatest of ease.  Well, that includes his climbing line, small rope, long rope, flip line, lanyard, cooler, carabiners, tweezers, harness, hair spray, high heels and  two chain saws on his belt.

One is a Stihl with a little 12" bar, the other another Stihl with a modest 24" bar.  Trend?  He takes down branches as he climbs up, then lops off about four to six feet of the top.  He keeps dropping down four to six feet at a time and continues taking her down, usually leaving a completely manageable six to eight foot stump.  (I get to play lumberjack in a completely safe zone!) 

He's been out twice now to handle trees of a delicate nature.  Like the ones I don't want in the bathtub or living room if I tried to take them down myself.  Anything that was close to the house, existing fencing and the propane tank were all dropped by him.  I think I have a few others I'll need him to do, plus cleaning up the two remaining view oaks, which we'll get to in a few paragraphs.

We had to winch a tall Digger Pine that was close to the road, just to make sure it fell our way.  I was the wench guy.  It came down with ease, precisely on target.  As I said, he's phenomenal.

What other species of trees do we have?  Besides the Diggers, of which I think I have about six or seven remaining (from twenty to sixty feet tall), we've got a few good size Ponderosa Pines (eighty feet plus in height), a ton of Black Oak and a number of Live Oak.  There are also about a dozen smaller cedars lining the drive, however their growth has been stunted by the natural and preponderating occurrence of the oak.  Or the lack of stewardship by the previous owner.  Or both.

We are meticulously thinning the herd.  I have been taking out the nasty black oaks that have been choking off the cedars.  With a little luck, in another four to five years we'll have some nicely formed cedars.  All the large Ponderosa's stay, but there are about sixty saplings from one to four inches in diameter that are getting the ax...so to speak.  They'd make great Tepee poles, if anyone has a need.  To make a Tepee that is.  And if you make a tepee, then you're probably gonna need some feathers.  And some buffalo.  Maybe a small herd.  Or just some jerky.  Either one.  And then you're gonna need a big rifle because some wolf is going to want your buffalo.  And all you want to do is dance around the fire in front of your tepee.  Drink a little moonshine.  Smoke a little peace.  Howl at the moon.

Then you could, you know, pretend like you went back in time again.  Or maybe you really did.  Go back in time that is.  As a Native American.  A wolf.  A bear.  Or a manatee.  I mean, who really knows for sure? Where the hell was I?

If a tree has a projected free fall zone, then there's no need to have a professional come in.  That's when you want Bud and the boys, all liquored up with a couple of large axes.  I've been involved twice.  It's a hoot.  I have pictures.  Pre-digital age.  I digress again.

If it has a projected free fall zone, then there's no need to attack it from the top.  First you make a low pie slice on the side and direction you want it to fall.  Depending on the size of the tree, you're going to slice in from two to four inches, and then physically take the pie wedge out that you've just cut.

Then on the opposite side of the tree, from ten to fifteen inches above the pie wedge you start your cut.  If all goes well, you'll hear a little crack and rumble.  That's when you grab your ankles.  No, wait a minute, that's if it falls in your direction.  Just back away.  Or run like hell.  Whichever suits the moment.

This oak was a perfect drop by our son-in-law the scientist.  First drop, with a saw that is.  Besides his scientific wizardry he does OK with a chain saw too!

Even when you have made a nice pie slice and your top cut is in perfect alignment, sometimes, if a little top heavy, the tree can rock back onto your chain saw blade.  Then you gotta get a steel wedge and tap that in to free your saw.  Or get a football team to push the tree in the right direction.  Whichever is easiest.  Fortunately that has only happened once so far.

You can make the perfect cuts and sometimes the tree doesn't cooperate.  The cleanest cut and fall allows the tree to fall directly on the ground without hitting anything.  Like a barn, or a house.  Or propane tank.  Or getting hung up in another tree, which gets extremely dangerous.

Then you have to get in and up and piece by piece start slicing the branches that are hung up, all the while being extremely cautious and ready for movement.  The trees gonna move, cause that's your goal.  You just don't want it to move onto you.  It's a lot of cautious, painstaking and dangerous work, much happily avoided if at all possible.  And fortunately, that has only happened once so far.

Slicing a big tree off at the trunk is merely the beginning. Once it's down, then begins the "brushing" process. This is when you take your chain saw and essentially cut all the small limbs off the larger branches and trunk, leaving on what you want to retain as firewood.  I typically cut everything containing leaves, and (ideally) one should try to time the drop when the tree is leave-less, if possible.  It's much less work. 

So then you take all this "slash" off and stack it somewhere.  Ideally you could have this stuff chipped for your soil.  That's a little bit more work.  And a big machine rental for me.  Since I have been doing most of the clean-up work myself, I have burned all mine so far.  And that's still a lot of work.

I've got about eight piles ready to ignite.  I won't start till after the first rain this fall when the ground gets wet.  Then it's all about getting a small "seat" going and let her rip.  I don't care if some of the seasoned brush is damp, nor if some of the brush is green.  Once I get  a "seat" going, it's on.  And that "seat" sometimes starts as small as a shoebox full of dry kindling, and then grows to about a six by six by six foot pyre.  All I need then is a dead Viking.  But then I'd have to go back in time.  Again. 

Then you start slicing up the bigger branches and trunk into four to six foot manageable lengths.  And then all that gets piled.

Then, once your body recovers from that abuse you "buck" it all up, slicing it into the correct lengths for your wood stove, in my case about twenty inches.  The smaller diameter (up to six inches or so) sticks get stacked right away.

The larger rounds get piled (yet again) and await my brother in law and his magnificent log splitter.  This thing has a Hemi in it, I swear.  It slices through the most knot gnarled thick oak truck with the ease of a soft breeze.  It could split a splitter.  It could split railroad ties with the train on the track.  Can't wait to see what it will do to this gnarled bit.

Once split, them pieces (of wood) all get stacked and await cremation this winter to keep out bodies warm.

This house came with a nice Vermont Castings wood stove in the living room.  We also have a gas heater with a thermostat, just like downtown.  It's nice to hear that kick on at five in the morning, but once a little coffee is coursing through my veins I'm making a fire.  With the assistance of a ceiling fan we're able to disburse that heat pretty well throughout the main living area of the house.  The gas heater rarely kicks on at night due to the heat from the wood stove.

Wood is a renewable energy, and ideally should not contribute to green house gas if it is perfectly combusted.  And most wood stoves these days are getting better at combustion, ours has an after burner catalytic converter, just like downtown.

We burned three cords of wood last year, 95% oak, which is probably the best hardwood to burn here on the west coast.  It burns much cleaner than a soft wood like pine, and hence there is less creosote build-up and less of a chance for a chimney fire.  Right now I've got just about one cord stacked (a cord is a neatly piled stack of wood that is 4'x4'x8') and about two more bucked and ready to be split.

Then I've got another three to five cords of oak on the ground in stages of brushing and bucking.  There's also about five to six cords of pine that's down.  I'm going to brush and buck that up, and my son (for one) will use it for camping.  If you're heading up to the Sierra's to go camping (and I know you) and you need some fire wood stop by.  I'll load you up while supplies last.

Then there's probably another few cords of oak that will be coming down as soon as I get my current mess cleaned up.  They're coming down so I can plant my fruit trees.  And once that is complete I'm gonna stop clearing for a year and concentrate elsewhere.  But by that time I'll have the stuff down that will allow me to do my deer fencing, the subject of another post.

I still have an easy ten to twelve or more cords of oak that need to come down, so I figure I'll have dollar-free energy for about a decade.  Definitely not energy free, it's the most physically taxing of all the fun stuff around here so far.  By that time the land should be clear and I'll be ready for a natural gas/propane conversion because my body will be battered and worn.

Besides thinning the trees, I'm also thinning most of the brush.  There's a lot of Manzanita on the "Upper 40", and I'm going to retain most of that natural charm.  I will continue to thin out and burn all the dead and dying stuff, of which there is a lot, since homeboy (the previous owner) was not so motivated during his last few years here.  Once that is done I may splash the hillside with some azaleas and rhododendrons as design sees fit.  We'll see.  But the main thing is getting it all cleared.  That drops the fire hazard plus gives me an opportunity to visualize the splashes.

Oh, and by the way, I also must mention that trees, given the opportunity, will grow just about anywhere.  On our land, they have not chosen to grow in one wonderfully level spot.  Nooooooo.  Not here.  They start at the bottom and go all the way to the top, and everywhere on un-level land in between.  It's been challenging to say the least.

I donate blood.  (Nice segue I know, but there really is a trick to this tale-just stay with me...)  So anyway, I went down after 9/11 and they didn't need me then.  They had more donations then they could handle at that one particular moment in time.  So I made an appointment and went back about sixty days later when they needed more.  I've continued to donate every 54 days (or whatever it is) since and they're always having a shortage.  It's been over a decade since 9/11.  Come on America, do we really need a catastrophe to drop a pint?  Couldn't we just do it a couple times a year for the fun of it?

I used to donate blood in a previous life, like back when I was an alien.  I donated then as I do now for three reasons: The people there have to be nice to you, even if you smell bad.  You get free treats, like cookies, even if you smell bad.  And I get my blood pressure checked for free, even if I smell bad.  I also feel that my alien body benefits from having to do the Corpuscle Hustle, allowing my entire circulatory system to get a semi-routine aerobic workout.  They say donating blood saves lives.  I do it for personal gain.

Oh, and by the way, to any Bill O'Reilly fans out there that are O Positive:  If you received a shot of OP blood in the San Francisco Bay Area about thirty years ago and sometimes feel like you're from a planet like Uranus you may be correct.

So last summer I had a regularly scheduled vampire event and my son in law the scientist was up with the fam.  He's a donator too and went down with me.  On the way there, there or back from there, or somewhere in between he convinced me we should chop down a tree.

I did tell him that my chain saw was in the shop, but we did have a couple axes.  He was adamant.  He was on a mission.  I think there were lumberjack issues.  So after donating a pint each, and after listening to them say that we should not have any strenuous physical exercise for 72 hours, we came back to the casa here and chopped down a tree.  It was a modest pine, only about a ten inch diameter and thirty feet on the high.  We huffed and we puffed, but that bad boy came down.

The next time he was up he took my new Echo for a road test.  I have a new Echo 310 with a fourteen inch bar, which is perfect (for me).  As long as the chain is sharp, I'm cutting everything in my path and the smaller bar is not nearly as physically draining as a larger bar can be.  Here he is (below) dropping that oak (above) as well as a couple others.  He has now proved his lumberjack-ness.  He is now a lumberjack, and he's OK.  He can sing the song with impunity. 

                                                               Cutting the pie wedge.

                                                               Making the big slice.

                                                                    Touchdown!

Since we have moved to this house, there has been a lot of stuff going on.  I'm sure of it.  Anyway, we do have a lovely covered porch in the front, and nice lawn (I'm working on) and picket fence.  The fence needs work, you'll get to hear all about it later!  But it's still a great place to relax, especially in the morning.  You don't want to be out there on a summer afternoon though, you'll end up like that toad in "African Violet's Like it Rough" land. 

So I was out there one day this last winter, taking a thirty-eight second break from my chores around here.  And as I gazed out upon our threshold, I saw the proverbial forest through the trees.  There was a sunset view out there and I was gonna get it.  There were only about fifteen obstacles in the way...

                                          The above "window" was not there a few trees ago...

Our phenomenal tree guy will be out again this winter cleaning and trimming up another three huge oaks in front.  The goal is to watch the sun set without interference beyond the westward range about two miles away.

Rooster Update

The Gold Master has recently run into potential borrowed time.  I've now had a couple personal run ins with him and (unfortunately) have sent him flying like a split roasted Brazilian soccer ball into the fence, a good six or more feet away.  He perceived I was accosting one of his girls, charged right on at me and then went flying like a kick ball when I was in sixth grade.  My wife has also had a run in, and he actually left a bruised wound.  She sent him flying with her hand, sort of like a volleyball.  Hey, I'm noticing a sporting trend...

BUT then, the day after they whacked each other, she had him in her arms and they were having a chat.  I dunno.  Anytime he perceives a threat to his girls, he gets aggressive.

If it continues, he has a house and ten acres waiting.

African Violet Update

These lower three violets were split (by hand) about three weeks ago.  They were also juggled and stuff and had no blooms.  They are happy, healthy and blooming now.  You can read more about them and my treatment thereof in "African Violets Like it Rough!"   And they look infinitely better than the silk replicas below.