Category: House

When we bought our house we saved the three most important pictures and to document the differences I went out in the garden today and reproduced then with our little camera. Of course they do not show exactly the same frame but it is pretty close and you can see what has changed since the last year. Take a look!

After Pup left we called an Exterminator (from Cambridge Chemicals) to have a look at our attic. During the time Pup slept upstairs he was noticing saw dust and some sand coming off the ceiling in regular intervals. He also noticed some noises like crackling and small pieces of material falling under the panels of the roof.
I opened the panel, where we had identified the largest amounts of dropping and found in the process a number of carpenters — as we had started to call them (carpenter ants) — but nothing close to what I was expecting to find. Of course the insulation was still hiding the roof’s wood but I was disappointed. The insulation at the highest point showed some signs of a water leak, though everything was dry as far as I could tell.
The exterminator came the next day and from the dust I did not cleanup he determined that those were carpenter ants at work and that he could not do much as the whole nesting was completely invisible due to the paneling and insulation. He suggested to redo the roof and kill the beasts during this process. That suggestion did not seem very reasonable to me as redoing the roof is a major undertaking and costs a lot of money. He also told me that with a ‘bomb’ which releases aerosols the ants could certainly be largely killed but would equally certainly come back. After I offered him to expose the two biggest spots of activities down to the roof frame he indicated that he thought he could exterminate the ants.
So, I went back and took down the insulation, which was actually really easy and found in the highest piece of the frame a large ‘gallery’ about one finger thick, which was completely carved out of the wood, but now there was not a single carpenter in sight. I found one later in the room but nothing on the inside of the roof close to the gallery. They might have moved into a different spot as Wikipedia suggests 🙂
I am pretty sure we are not going to redo the roof just for the ants, and I think I will just open the panels and the insulation and exterminate the ants myself. Maybe I will on top of that place a aerosol bomb in the attic to make double sure the ants get killed. We are also spraying the garden and the foundations and drop some granulate against the ants from the outside. I am already now quite happy that I opened the panels and insulation in the attic because now I have seen what the roof looks like from the inside. I think I can easily redo the attic and even do a better job than what is there right now. I might even be able to put in the new sky light by myself — Ana would really love to have more light in the North side of the attic.
Stay tuned…. I will report on the next steps.

Today we continued with the gardening and started finally on our fruit planting. We have a long list of things we like and today we started with the berries. We have planted 4 small blueberry bushes, defining the property line with Jim and Joanie just across the sun room. I hope they will catch on, in particular as they do not get too much direct sun. They are supposed to grow as high as 2m, and they should form a solid hedge. We purchased four different types which will allows for plenty of cross pollination. In blueberries a decent fruit harvest depends quite a bit on the cross pollination. Of course it will take a while until we get a decent hedge and who knows when we are going to eat our first blueberries.
The three raspberry bushes we bought were a little more difficult to place. Those guys spread like weed and we wanted them to live in our forest, maybe even defining the forest line a bit and cover the ramp which is mildly visible from the patio. I wanted to put them on the left-hand side right on the tree line, but Ana pointed right at the middle, same line. The big advantage of that spot is of course that there is a big rock which will prevent the raspberries from spreading into the garden. Raspberries fresh from the bush are one of my favorite fruits. I cannot wait for them to carry the first fruit.
Meanwhile, we have also been improving on the living room furniture: we have found a super large coffee table fitting our large sofa. Ana added also a nice seat on the TV side. Both pieces are really breaking the general style of the rest of the living room but in a nice way, we think 🙂

This year spring started with a wonderful weekend. Friday had some beautiful weather in store for us, so beautiful in fact that I decided to leave really early (around 16:00). I spent a number of hours in the garden with the kids jumping around and Ana keeping Blake happy and chilling on our little terrace. This weekend we decided to make a big push in the garden instead of doing excursions to the local beaches. It turned out to be the right decision. We had a wonderful Saturday with temperatures in the high teens and maybe even into the low twenties.
We finished our project to fill the areas around the house with our natural stone from the terrace digging. After filling the north side, where we park the car, we liked it so much that we started considering filling also the south side in between the bushes in front of the sun room.
I also finished filling up the right front part of the garden with a layer of good black dirt and planted grass seeds for a dense lawn. Once I drove by the garden center I was tempted and further encouraged with the kids to buy some vegetables. We bought a broad variety but only planted three types in front of the back window: carrots (Markus’ favorite — he likes the color and if they are cooked he even likes eating them), water melon (Ivan’s favorite — he loves to eat them) and broccoli (Gisele’s favorite — first thing she will eat on any plate). We marked the location on the retaining wall and hope that there is no more frost, otherwise we might not see any of those veggies.
Finally after cleaning up the back of the garden I continued digging our terrace. I established a new and more efficient scheme, in which I will take care of the smaller stones while digging. Instead of storing them in a temporary location I was using them to fill in the houses’ south side. The dirt from the dig is now used to even out the bottom of the terrace right at the houses south side. I increased the wall and the filling goes well so far. I will have to plant a lawn there but that should be fine because the lawn there is terrible. I made quite some progress on Sunday, which was another beautiful day with lots of sun but it was rather chilly. The terrace building has been going very slowly because the ground has become mostly just rocks. On the positive side though I have been finding a lot of rocks which are big enough to build the retaining wall 🙂 . Presently, I am estimating that the terrace will be completed after maybe one but definitively after two more weekends.