Plus they are these old fiberboard shelves I bought 15 years ago, so I feel like I've gotten full value from them.

That's a solid hour of dusting every week, and that didn't always happen.

So yesterday I took a trip to IKEA and came home with a Billy bookcase and a door for it. I'd love to figure out some way to make it all look nice and clean with orderly shelves, but I'm pretty happy with just having everything closed up nice and neat in one cabinet.

What you can't see in this picture is that there was another shelf unit in the bathroom that we also removed, so the scale fits in the bathroom again. We had been weighing ourselves in the laundry room, which is not nearly as comfortable as it seems like it ought to be.

(Gosh, it would be really great if I finished painting the bathroom, wouldn't it? I started that the week before our wedding so I do have an excuse, but not a good one because we recently celebrated our seventh anniversary.)

The other project for this weekend was reorganizing the pantry. We had a lot of loose packages of stuff and stuff piled everywhere and anywhere on the shelves, so on the same trip to IKEA I got some glass storage jars and then spent a nice afternoon with the label machine and the jars and ended up with this:

We have eight kinds of flour, people. (All-purpose, cake, whole wheat, bread, soy, almond, hazelnut, and semolina, plus gluten which I didn't count.) I didn't even count the many types of sugar, but the list starts with three different shades of brown sugar and gets longer and longer from there.

To get everything to fit nicely, I put a bunch of smaller things like vases and egg cups in boxes and put them on higher shelves, because while I do use them, I don't use them every day. I also moved a bunch of stuff we never used and will not use out to the giveaway pile.

This thing is about getting rid of things I don't just LOVE, and to that end we've made quite a pile in the dining room:

Everything there, minus the table and the cat (would it be a Casa Decrepit photo without some animal creeping in to pose?), plus a couple other boxes of stuff in other parts of the house, is leaving in the next two weeks. (We're having an un-garage-un-sale next weekend, I think.)

I almost can't believe how much of a pile we've made. When I started I half thought the pile would end up being much smaller, but as soon as you start throwing furniture into the mix the volume increases a lot.

Remember how we fitted out our pantry that the previous owners had turned into a bathroom? Two years ago? We left the doorway undone, because it's really not a renovation project if you actually finish it, is it?

It looked like this:

Yeah, for two years, two really awesome years with our fine pantry, we have lived with plaster edges that leave little white stripes on us if we lean against the doorway, and rough wood that gives you splinters if you look at it wrong in easy reach.

We saved some odd scraps of drywall from one of the other rooms that was getting drywall work done, and then spent months talking about how to address the weird little gap at the top -- the sort of problem it's easy enough to deal with right away, but then you start fussing over it and it seems insurmountable.

Anyway, back in May we cut and put the side pieces in place. But it wasn't until I went away last week that Noel got around to doing the last couple pieces.

He even used the fancy drywall spray glue (see those streaky read bits?) to put the corner bead in place. This means I only need to move the stove and the refrigerator and plaster this all up, then prime and paint and we are good.

And you know that's going to happen Right Away.

You can hardly tell, but left is heat-gun only, right is palm-sander only, middle is both. Middle looks pretty nice, no?

It came out looking pretty good compared to what was there before, but it was time-consuming. I'm not sure of any other way to deal with the issue; people have suggested we just remove the paneling and turn it backwards, but our experience with removing woodwork in this house is that your chances of destroying the woodwork in the process are pretty much perfect.

In a half day of work, though, he managed to get most of a wall cleaned off, which is pretty good.

I think we might have a couple more days of scraping on the stuff ahead, though naturally now we've got a had cold running around the household, and nothing is quite as unpleasant as trying to do hard work in a respirator with a cold.

The front bedroom is a little crowded right now.

But it has nothing on the Accordion Room, though admittedly this is not a fair photo because I took it right after we moved all the stuff in and before it got put away.

And then we had the back bedroom cleared out for work. (Well, mostly.)

The first stage of the work is to strip the terrible mastic off the wainscoating. That's heat gun and scraper, then sander. (We already had the mastic tested for asbestos and it came out negative.)

Then I'll come through and finish the plaster repairs and washing the old chalky paint off the walls. That should be pretty fast, since most of the work is done.

Then we can paint! Then we can take up the carpet and spend a month refinishing the floor! And we have a deadline for this, because we're going on a trip in the fall and a housesitter is coming to stay here with the many many pets, so the room has to be done by then. And I just spent a week on a retreat and came back determined to (among other things) get rid of half my stuff, so I'm kind of starting that project at the same time. So the next few weeks should be interesting.

Noel actually did some work on the room last week while I was away, so I just need to find those photos and I can show you how it's coming along.

The whole process was remarkably without disasters, although it turns out somebody mismeasured and we need to make some small adjustments. No big deal, though.

Now we need to make all the cross-beams -- of which we have a rough sample in the front there. We've decided to just buy a biscuit joiner for the job -- we often think we'd like to have one and we know we would get a lot of use out of it.

In the meantime, we stuck a few junk 2x4 pieces in there to hold the pergola together.

And here it is from a seat at the dining room table. (Why yes, I do still have my Valentine's Day decorations up.) As you can see, when fully engulfed in the passiflora vine, it will nicely block our neighbor's bedroom window when you're sitting at the table.

About half an hour later, our 4x6es were 3.5x6es.

Tomorrow I'll re-stain the planed sides, and then we can put the main frame of the pergola together. We still have to make the small cross-pieces and then stain them.

I'm guessing we should buy one of these guys; it was a very handy item.

We haven't been getting much done around the house this summer because it's been an endless stream of social engagements, so this weekend we decided to try to make some real progress on the pergola.

Try being the operative word.

Yesterday, Noel cut the 12-foot long 4x6 beam into two 6-foot pieces, then sanded them to get the mill grease and dirt off the outside.

Then I did the staining/sealing, which went very smoothly and mostly cleanly, especially given how big of a mess I usually make while staining wood.

Ditto for the 4x4 posts. And that was yesterday's work on that. (We also made bread and pizza and moved some books around inside, and found the kittens' collars which had disappeared again; it was a fairly productive day.)

In the evening, Noel washed and cleaned the labels off the various metal ties we will use to put the pergola together.

This morning I took those ties and laid them out on a tarp.

I primed them with metal primer.

And I painted them. I didn't have enough paint to do the insides, but that's not too big a deal since they are already galvanized. The paint is just to make them look pretty on the pergola.

I also painted the bases of the posts. (And some of the grass.)

In the meantime, Noel began placing the posts in the bases, which looked pretty fun from over on the painting tarp.

To keep water from being a huge problem, we sealed the grain on the end of each post with silicone sealant. This means that if a little water gets into the base, it doesn't wick into the wood. Yes, the wood is also sealed. Braced and belted, as they say.

I think the posts look really nice in the bases. I love the stain and the black base. Very fancy look.

And then we ran into our problem. Our almost show-stopping problem. The 4x6 beam we got from Economy Lumber is unfaced, which means it nowhere near fits into our Simpson Strong-Tie fastening hardware, which means we need to trim the beam down (really, honestly, we have considered every alternative and none of them work as well as quickly as trimming down the beam).

Except we have no tool that can handle this. The band saw we got from Noel's parents is not large enough. Our table saw is not large enough. The circular saw is not large enough. The radial-arm saw is not large enough. Nothing we have can cut a 6 1/8" deep beam in the tall direction without two passes and some serious planing work.

We have a few phone calls and e-mails out to friends who might have such equipment, though, so we will hold out hope. If necessary, we can always rent the right tool, right?

At this point, we could have given up, but Noel pointed out that this was a rare day this summer that was both nice and sunny and not too hot (mostly it's been dark and foggy and cold here, which is really unusual), and we might as well get as much done as possible.

So we put some scrap 2x4s in the slots for the 4x6es, then screwed our single sample cross-beam in place, and now we can see the finished pergola, sort of.

Yes, it's very tall. This is going to have a passiflora vine growing over it, and they are aggressive and large, so we decided to err on the side of oversized, especially as we'll lose the top foot or so of head space to hanging vines. Also, we got kind of lazy on trimming down the posts. Mea culpa.

Also -- and this was a bonus I didn't even think of until we tried out various heights for the pergola this morning -- this will block the view from our dining room window into our neighbor's bedroom window, which means no more accidentally seeing her in her underwear during breakfast, and that's a big win for us.

So when a colleague arranged a tour of Waste Management's Davis Street Transfer Station for this afternoon, I leapt at the chance to go along. (By the way, they offer tours of the facility for interested parties in trash-related fields -- like people who design buildings or build them -- on demand.)

The big news to me was that Waste Management always sorts debris boxes. So our regular dumpster-loads are sorted -- partially by hand, partially by machine -- and about 76% of their contents are recycled rather than landfilled. That is very reassuring.

That means that 76% of our last dumpster-load -- seen here exiting the driveway a few weeks ago -- actually ended up somewhere other than the landfill. Well, actually, not this particular dumpster-load, because we generally only put things in a dumpster if they can't be recycled, but on average.

Anyway let's start with household waste.

This is an enormous room full of trash. You may recall seeing the outside of this building in my December post about the landfill. That is a 17 foot deep pit that is 350 feet long and I forget how many feet wide but it's very very big. When you throw something away, it gets dumped there.

Apparently people often call the transfer station because they've thrown away something truly valuable ($50,000 worth of jewelry in one case), but once it has been dumped in here it's effectively gone. Nothing that comes into this room gets sorted.

This video shows a garbage truck dumping its load into the pit. The pit accepts 2800 tons (TONS) of trash every day. Yes, every DAY.

Not shown (because we didn't visit it) is the recycling sorting center. While trash is never sorted, all recycling that comes through here is hand-sorted, and here's a public service message: don't put needles in the recycling, not even inside of a glass bottle. The most common injury on the site is needle-sticks in the recycling sorting line. If you have a friend or relative who uses needles, make sure they put them in a sharps box and dispose of them properly.

Now on to the commercial waste part of the facility.

The materials come in here in the debris boxes:

In addition to the debris boxes (the same dumpsters that we order for our house), the regular trash stream from a selected category of businesses is diverted here to be sorted, because those businesses tend to have low recycling compliance.

Here's a little sample of what is in the big pile: a little side-pile of inert materials to be ground up and used as the base for roads.

Yes, check out those expensive slabs of stone. I wonder how long they were actually used before somebody decided they were dated and needed replacing.

Much of the sorting in the MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) is automated, but there's a very short human sorting line at the beginning of the process. These people pull out pieces of wood, paper, and metal that are easy to grab as the stuff goes by.

This first sorting pulls out all kinds of stuff. This is one of the metals bins:

Small, inert materials are sorted out by the machines and dumped in a pile. This is used at the landfill to cover the day's deposits to keep trash from blowing out and birds from getting into the trash. This doesn't count as recycled, because it ends up in the landfill.

All along the sorting line in the MRF you see piles of sorted materials, ready to move on.

The wood, for example, ends up here, in a big pile:

It's then ground up, and they pass a magnet over the ground-up material to remove the nails to sell for scrap separately.

The ground up wood is taken off-site to be composted or used for other shredded-wood applications. And yes, there is engineered wood with random and possibly toxic adhesives mixed in with good wood.

And here are some videos of the trash sorting. There's a much larger automated material handling line than just this bit, but I was particularly taken by this part, where small pieces that have been shaken out of the stream are then run over with a magnet to remove ferrous metals.

(No small part of why I only have two videos from this building is that the light in the building is not optimized for shooting video with a little handheld camera. I have lots of other video that is some indistinct dark shapes making huge amounts of noise against a bright background.)

It was a very informative trip. Plus they gave me this:

I guess that's so I can play trash man with my Barbies or something.

We're filling it with all our old, destroyed siding that we had stored as evidence for our court case. And some other debris we had lying around. It's kind of surprising how much stuff just ends up strewn all over a property over time, no?

But it's cold and drafty in the winter, and we have been wanting more solid walls in there for a while. This weekend, we decided it was a good time to work on that project, because Noel had the flu! And construction work when you are incapacitated with illness is So Much Fun.

Here's where we started yesterday:

(Actually, that is the room after I swept up the little bits of litter the cats had been tracking all over the place.)

You can see that the floor of this area, installed by the previous owners, is a pair of 4x8 sheets of plywood. We decided to confine the room to that space, because it was easier to manage construction that way.

After we took down all the chicken wire, we began with the back wall, and built a wooden frame around the room. Sensibly, we built each wall on the floor and tilted it up into place. Much easier than trying to built it in place.

We got the walls all in place yesterday night, but did not seal off the top between the rafters with chicken wire until this afternoon. It seemed like it might not be necessary until we woke up to an utterly filthy cat; he'd gotten up over the wall and was hanging out above the bathroom.

This afternoon we borrowed a stapler from our neighbor and got the chicken wire in place. Now the boys have a little room all their own that isn't too drafty. We have a moving wall over on the right -- we didn't attach it to anything so we can just open it up completely to check the roof -- and we have a nice big door on the other side to get to the other junk we have stored in the attic.

At some point I'm going to go in there and paint the underside of the roof and the walls white, so there's even more light. The cats have a little nightlight so they're not in total darkness, but light walls would help make it a bit brighter in there for them.

Also, we've been reorganizing the basement lately, and I think we might have cleared off enough of one shelf that we could bring it up here to put a few things on it. We don't like to store too much stuff in the attic because it has such extremes of temperature, but it'd be nice to have a place to put the cat food and litter. I'm sure the boys would also like to have a nice high-up cat bed in there, as well.

Over the last few months one of our neighbors has gotten really belligerent with us and has been trying to use the legal framework of the city to harass us. It's when things like this happen that I am very glad all our work is done with permits (or doesn't require them). So when you think it might be cheaper and faster to just redo your bathroom on the down-low, consider that you are also giving your neighbors the power to cause you some serious financial setbacks.

On a lighter note, I got a super fancy new lens for my fancy new camera, and it allows me to take near-180 degree photos. Which means I can stop piecing together crazy panoramas of rooms and just show you things like this:

That's the back bedroom, spectacularly messy. Yup, I didn't even bother to close the closet door, or pick up the comforter lying on the floor, waiting to be taken to the laundromat (it doesn't fit in our washer). You know how it is when you get a new toy.

On another note, I figure it's been about six years since I took down the paneling in this room: maybe it's time I got around to finishing repairing the plaster and painting it?

Noel bought 2x6 redwood for the pieces, and we plan to make an arched piece through a bit of trickery that relies on the cross pieces having no structural value.

So today we made a cutting template so that we could cut out a bunch of boards quickly and easily. We started with a piece of scrap plywood.

The width of the arch is actually 50", and the plywood, being standard plywood, is 48", so we cut it off at a diagonal to get a longer edge.

Then we marked the two sides of the arch, and used a string and pencil to mark the arc itself. (I will spare you a description of the two of us trying to backwards-engineer the sort of casual geometry most carpenters take for granted. Suffice it to say that in retrospect it was kind of funny.)

Then Noel cut out the arc with a jigsaw.

And then he sanded the edge smooth. The plywood was pretty knotty, so the edge needed a lot of work.

(We got the lawnmower out because the stupid grass kept getting in the way while we were marking the arc. So at least a small part of our lawn is mowed.)

When the template was all cut out and put together, Noel cut out a sample from a scrap piece of 2x6.

And there we are. With the final pieces, we'll dowel and glue the top curve onto the bottom.

One thing to keep in mind is that most lumber you buy is faced, which means that the edges have been knocked down. With a faced piece of lumber, the joint will have an obvious gap. But the lumber we bought is rough cut, so we'll have to do more work with it, but we can make that gap disappear.

That's a nice bowlful of Black Tartarian cherries, Fall Gold raspberries, and alpine strawberries. Sometimes we go out for a walk around the garden and just stand next to a plant eating until all the ripe fruit is gone. Occasionally we bring a bowl and some of the fruit makes it into the house. Only once has some of the fruit lasted overnight.

(This is more a reflection of how little fruit we have than voracious appetites, I admit.)

I really like the alpine strawberries. They have a muskier, earthier flavour. And more concentrated (they are a smaller berry). Also, they grow up off the ground. This is a benefit when you have this problem:

Yeah, Goldie spent much of the afternoon napping in the strawberry bed. This is why I planted the alpine strawberries outside the fence.

This is going to be a good year for fruit. Not for nectarines, because the nectarine trees have peach leaf curl something bad and I've made an executive decision to thin the trees to nothing this year to reduce stress.

In addition, this weekend we radically pruned the passiflora vine and relocated it,

That tiny little stick is all that is left of a fairly large vine. I'm guessing we're not going to have many passionfruit this year.

But we have apples:

And blueberries:

There are some flower things going on, too. I recently got a new camera that I can use my film lenses with, and hey, it does a great job of capturing some of the bright and crazy colours coming out in the garden right about now.

The rose hedge is in full bloom right now, and it just goes to show you that it's hard to mess up with roses in this climate; I didn't do the winter pruning I was supposed to, and yet the roses are going crazy and looking just fine.

And just as we start to get to the end of the raspberries, these poppies have started growing up in their midst. I suppose I must have planted those. Maybe it was when I was throwing poppy seedheads all over the place last year.

We started out with this: a "roof" made of bird netting. It's effective: no hawk has ever dived through it. But it's a pain in the butt to deal with overhead, because it tangles in anything and everything. To prep the fence for our work we rolled the netting back and to the side.

We started out by fastening one long beam to the top of the existing fence with bendable L brackets.

Then we attached a short piece of wood to the side of the shed and used that to set the straps for the other side of the roof.

With the second beam in place we were ready to measure the length of the rafters. Since the yard is not perfectly square, and it doesn't matter, we measured each rafter before cutting it and just worked our way across.

A roof like this is pretty simple to frame up.

When we had two rafters in place, we measured and cut some hardware cloth to cover the area between them. Using roofing nails with big flanges, we nailed the hardware cloth in place. We worked on one side of the cloth at a time, so we could take advantage of overlapping.

To make things easier in the yard, I took apart the chicken gym and moved it out of the way. But the compost piles were still right where Noel needed the ladder at the end.

Here's a closer look at how we attached things. I'm not a big fan of toenailing, so we bought some Strong Tie fasteners to attach the rafters. And we had a bunch of straps from our Big Cabinet O'Strong Ties left over from various projects and abandoned on site by various contractors.

And here's the dismantled chicken gym. I've been thinking of reconfiguring it to be more like the parts they use most often: a few staged perches and a shaded lower area. So this was a good excuse to take it apart and use the pieces to build something new.

And just to show you how much we care about safety, Noel climbed up on the fence to saw off an end that was a bit long. But note that he's holding the saw with the sharp edge facing away from himself. Safety first, kids!

We were a bit short on hardware cloth: our last opening was 30" wide and the stuff we had was 24" wide, so a run to the store is in order. But apart from that last bit of nailing, we got this whole project done in about three hours, including cutting a 2x12 into 2x6es.

The last remaining bit is the roof over the back of the shed, which we might make as a rain shelter so the chickens have somewhere dry to stand when it's raining. They refuse to go inside their room, though, so maybe they will stubbornly insist on standing in the rain even if we make them a roofed area.

Last year we posted a little sketch that showed what we were thinking about. Since then we've spent more time examining the area and thinking about how such a structure can fit into the space.

For those of you who did not spend 3-5 years in architecture school, a pergola is a covered walkway. We're just doing a gestural pergola here: an interior footprint of slightly over four feet by four feet (wide enough to allow us to bring pallet loads of materials into the back).

Yesterday, we dug the foundations.

We started by pruning the passiflora vine heavily. That's that lumpy shrub thing growing over the path, making everybody crazy. We also had to move it a few feet, so it got both a heavy top pruning and a substantial root pruning. It was full of snails, so it was a bonanza for the chickens.

We spent quite a bit of time laying out where the foundations would go relative to our house and the neighbor's house, and relative to the rest of the pathway. That board there is what we used to measure the 4-ft width of a pallet; we left a little more room in the path (because a pallet might be a quarter inch off exactly four feet wide).

It makes sense to measure several times to be sure everything is where you want it to be. Concrete foundations aren't impossible to remove and replace, but they are a colossal pain in the butt to remove and replace.

For these foundations, we used these cardboard footing forms you can buy at the lumberyard. Certainly they were more than we needed for the pergola, but we're using this as practise for building the deck that we plan to build this summer.

We also dumped some of our extensive rock collection down in the bottom to fill up some space and give ourselves the illusion that we were using the rocks for a useful purpose.

And here we are with a little smoothed-off dome of concrete and a brace to set the post into.

Surprisingly, when I set the braces in, thinking I would have to adjust them to be square and lined up with each other properly, I managed to set them right on square and parallel, which I could not have done if I had been trying.

The foundations spent the day setting up today while we worked on another project. We still need some lumber and connectors for the project, so it's not going up in the next post, alas.