Tag Archives: landscaping

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make your bed

the hot yard guy

The weekend was a bit of a blur cleaning and preparing for Chris. (Kevin’s old friend from Cleveland days – who’s now moved Las Vegas and is coming to St. Louis for the week to visit).

Kevin, (insanely in my opinion), decided to take on putting in the bed we’ve been talking about in the front of the house.

I kinda feel like a shit since all my job was to determine the shape and scale of the bed while he’s been digging it out by hand, wrestling with tree roots and making his arms go numb using the RYOBI tiller. (*thanks fat_chick_sings! – We finally found a use for it!)

Kev seems inexhaustibly nervous… He wants the house to look as nice as possible for his buddy. I don’t really think it’s for the sake of putting on aires though. When Kevin left Cleveland six years ago, he met a lot of resistance from friends and family and I think whenever anyone visits from his previous life – he tends to try very hard to drive home the message: “I have a good life here – and I’m very happy.”

Flower beds are hardly a determiner for one’s happiness… but he really does get a genuine high off of a sense of accomplishment.. and he reaaaaaly likes getting dirty and playing with power tools.

I really like having a handsome bloke running around in cut off sweat shorts in the front yard. One that I can not only sexually harass at will – but also one who’s infinitely patient with my art direction and who I know will be out with a tape measure making sure the angles of the bed mirror the lines of the house within .00009 degrees. (virgos rock)

I also really like denying blogging.

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landscape


no, really – I wanted to focus on the variegated vinca,… really.

Kevin plays great “bad cop”. He was on the horn with the home warranty people and got us an appointment for the next day where as all I could get was one for next week.

Lethargic and my powerbook running atomic hot, I sprawled myself under a fan and decided to take a cat nap in the 92 degree house. I awoke 30 minutes later to clanking around outside the bedroom window. The AC man was here!!! I jumped outa bed excited only to dive infront of the bed realizing I was naked and our bedroom window sits just to the side of the AC unit.

I crawled to the bathroom to grab my clothes and head outside and get the 411.

According to “the man” – though the unit is 17 years old, it’s in great condition and this particular model is known to be a tank. He repaired the fan blade and deemed the damage to the coils inconsequential and left.

In other home news and general Kevin praise: the little industrious monkey came up with an idea to repurpose the boards from the fence we took down last month. Implements of mass destruction in-hand and a few hours later and he built a border for the beds in the front of the house.

I was totally skeptical while he was building it – but now that it’s in – I love it. They’re stepped so the boarder itself has an “architectural” look and he followed the lines of the house tastefully.

Lots of folks in the hood have put in beds / liners and have done these loopy-poo circles and crap which looks wonky sitting in front of a very angular modern house.

Hi.. Welcome to This Olde Ranch, I’m The Monkeybear, your host who doesn’t blog.

 

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boooooonsaiiiii


tree trimmin’ men

So I parked my butt at the dining room table to work on this t-shirt and I kept catching glimpses of what looked like trees walking along outside of the dining room window.

I finished my work up for the day, put on my yard clothes and headed outside to help the guys with whatever it was they were doing.

chad trimming bush

The “treebush” monster along side our house is now trimmed up and looks like a big bonsai tree. Apparently the four previous owners of this house didn’t touch it and it had decades of overgrowth and dead limbs.

I like it – but it’s one third the size it used to be and doesn’t provide the vanity shield for the corner window like it used to. It’s o.k. – I’ll give a little when it comes to yard aesthetics vs. walking around in my living room at night in my underoos. “Duh Jim, just close the damn blinds.”

“Double Duh Jim, you sound like you’re blogging.. cut it out.”

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bobcat

say bye bye

Passover Sunday wasn’t it?

Up early as usual and returned the carpet cleaner and picked up some breakfast stuff for the boys.

When I returned I heard the familiar whir of an electric drill and that nails-on-chalkboard sound that wood makes sometimes coming from the side of the house.

Kevin was up, dressed, outside and wielding power tools! (woopie- I love it when he does that)!

inside story: We’ve coined the name “BB (Butterbutt) and The Ausie” for the homes previous owners. The husband, a portly fellow who would have been super cute if he grew a beard and his wife was from Brisbane Australia. (They moved back to Australia after we bought the house. – thus the killer deal of getting all the appliances, etc. with the house.

BB & The Ausie installed the fence when they bought the house in ’98 and like everything else they did – was stub-standard and half-ass.

Here it is 5 years later and the fence is warping and leaning…

kevin taking down fenceKevin and Chad tackled the job of taking down the fence and I tackled the laundry and made brunch.

The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and talking, (debating), over what to do with the landscaping.

While the fence “did” look like crap – I liked the privacy if afforded.

The lots are tiered, so we’re thinking about doing a retaining wall along the west-side and back of the property… and from there either doing privacy “plantings” or doing another (correctly installed) fence.

Kev of course thinks we can do this ourselves – but I know what his agenda is… he wants to rent a bobcat and drive it around… he’s not fooling anyone.

Sorta like I’m probably not fooling anyone by saying I’m not blogging.