Noel spent the last couple evenings laying the tiles. They go quickly, but we only had little bits and pieces of time here and there, so it took a couple days. And he even took up a piece of plywood we had screwed down to cover a hole and made a flat repair on that spot so we could tile over it.

And there you have it. A little fake wood paneling and some Sassy Pink paint from Walmart and we'd be right back where we started.

The boys are glad to have their room back, I think. And we're glad to have their litter boxes out of the hallway.

First I emptied the room. The cats were none too happy about that (that's Henry in the bottom of the picture there, crouched in front of me and scowling).

The floor in that room was disgusting. I don't know what cats get on their feet and I really don't want to know, but there was a thick layer of gunge on the plywood. I spent a couple of hours on the floor with the palm sander, getting that off. And another hour vacuuming up all the dust that made.

Then we set up the paint sprayer and got to work. Now, granted the sprayer we bought was super cheap and from Harbor Freight, so we got what we paid for, but we had quite a lot of trouble getting it adjusted right. And once it was adjusted, I had a hard time getting the knack of making nice even movements that apply the paint evenly. Much like applying paint with a roller, it's not too hard to get some paint on there, but not nearly so easy to get it nice and even and clean. I ended up with a lot of drips.

Also, the process of thinning the paint, straining it, and filling the sprayer jar was quite messy, and I can definitely say we made more of a mess than we usually do painting with rollers.

However, some things can't be painted by rollers, like the ceiling of our attic. I was quite happy with how well painting that went with the sprayer.

The end result was everything I wanted it to be, though. We lightened the room up a lot so it'll be easier to see when I go in there to clean. And I put a layer of primer on the floor for the peel-n-stick floor tiles we have waiting to be installed (I decided not to stay up until midnight tonight installing them, in a fit of common sense). The floor tiles will be a lot easier to maintain than a plain plywood floor.

We still need to study the paint sprayer some more -- Noel thinks there's a missing spring in the flow adjustment -- but it could be a very useful tool for some of the more awkward places we have to paint.

With some feline assistance, he systematically worked his way across the installed carcasses. For some reason the instructions had told us to put the pins that tie the cabinets together into just the wrong spot, so he had to move all of those, then install the back of the hinge.

IKEA cabinets use European style hidden hinges, obviously. They make for a nice clean look and let the door open wider than some of the hinge styles you see in the US.

As you can see, Noel spent a bunch of time this last week putting things in these cabinets, both from the original cabinet and from other parts of the kitchen. So far this means we go to where the thing used to be kept and stare blankly before locating it in its new home.

And here are the finished cabinets. We will eventually get some knobs or door pulls of some sort, and we're discussing putting some under-cabinet lighting in, but it's looking pretty nice right now. There's even a little palimpsest moment in the lower left, where you can see the marks from the previous cabinet on the wall.

I'm kind of perilously close to getting into some serious trouble ordering fruit trees. There are still a few spots in the yard where I could squeeze one in, but it's getting awfully tight back there.

So this weekend was slotted out for planting these trees, and doing some other transplanting I wanted to get done.

First I needed to move the pluot (Flavour Supreme, for those keeping track). This is the only surviving tree from the four I got at the scion exchange a couple of years ago, either through general mismanagement or accident. I still need to get a pollinator to graft onto it, since I think there is a limit to how many plum or plummy trees I want to have.

I also wanted to transplant the potted irises there. I got those from a neighbor ages ago and they have well outgrown the pot and stopped blooming, so I decided to put them in the ground. I'm not sure I'm the right person to grow irises -- I find them excessively fussy about their living conditions -- but if they do well in the ground they can stay there.

The front walk is looking a little overgrown. That's actually only about 10 percent weeds, though; the rest are plants I planted or the California poppies.

In the upper part of the front garden I dug out the pluot, planted a quince in the center of the area (this is Ekmek, another Turkish quince), and transplanted all those irises, dividing them at the same time. The irises seemed quite put out, but maybe they will enjoy having room to grow and fertile soil.

And the front, after planting three trees. You can hardly tell the extents of my madness.

The pluot gets the spot by the driveway. I pruned it heavily, but I'm still not sure it has a good shape. I love my trees but am not overly sentimental about them: if a tree has a bad shape I'm willing to dig it out and get a different one. This pluot is under observation to see how it does here.

The two plums I bought this year are on the other side, next to the crabapple a friend gave me before moving out of state.

The order of the trees is: Whitney crabapple, Parfumé de Septembre plum, and Golden Transparent plum. All are on dwarfing rootstock.

This has been one crazy winter, really. Not nearly enough rain, bitterly cold (for here) and alternating with warm weather. No wonder the plants are confused.

Here comes a daffodil from the two dozen or so I planted in the swath of yard between our front yard and the neighbors'. Only one of those is coming up this early, but still.

And this ribes has little leaf buds opening.

As does this lonicera.

After planting my trees I planted the free gifts I got with my purchase. I always forget the free gifts, so it's this fun surprise in the box. I got a red raspberry which I planted by the yellow raspberry, and a package of strawberry starts that I just could not find enough room for; I left them on the neighbors' front porch.

One of which was replacing the failing kitchen cabinet.

(Our kitchen is not usually this tidy; I moved everything out of the way in order to begin this project. Normally this countertop is a raging pile of drying herbs, piled up recipes, notes to ourselves, and assorted animal medications.)

The cabinet has been slowly falling off the wall for the last couple of years, though recently the fall has accelerated and that was giving us some worry.

These cabinets were built by some member of the previous owners' family, and were completely inadequately supported. Also, I'm not a big fan of the closed-in soffit look; I figure if you have the space, put more cabinets up there.

Anyway, we had resolved that sometime early this year we would go get some IKEA cabinets and tear out the original cabinet on this wall. And today it was gray and rainy and so we just kind of tore a big hole in the kitchen.

While Noel bought cabinet carcasses (isn't that a delightfully grim term of art?), I took everything out of the cabinet and removed the doors. Then we both slid the big kitchen drawer unit out of the way and got to work.

The old cabinet and soffit were the usual combination of really weirdly built and totally overbuilt. For example, I think I would have used fewer nails on this non-structural piece of blocking.

And while it is called "taping," I don't often see packing tape used in drywall work.

Eventually we found ourselves here, with a large, very mushy piece of drywall that was held in by two (TWO) nails. So we pulled it out.

And found a window. Which would be right behind our toilet, so I guess it's good that it's not there any more?

From the other side of that piece of removed drywall, we pieced together the history of this wall as follows:

• Originally, the kitchen had a nice big window facing the back yard, looking out onto a back porch with the ceiling painted sky blue.
• Somebody came along and lowered the ceiling, putting in a new cove molding that was cut to go around the top of the window.
• When the previous owners moved in in the late 1950's, they closed in the back porch to make a bathroom. At that time they took out the large window, creating a niche in the bathroom that they painted light blue.
• Maybe at the same time, they built cabinets over the kitchen wall.
• When their daughter took over the house in the late 80's, she ripped out that niche, and added another layer of framing and drywall to the bathroom.

With that window in place, the kitchen would be a much more pleasant room to be in.

As I mentioned, there was a fair share of goofy building in this window hole. Like this layer of corrugated cardboard between the plaster and a layer of drywall.

Here's the sky-blue porch ceiling, plus some of the weirdest framing I've ever seen.

Anyway, with that window opening in there we needed to add some framing to hang cabinets from. It was pretty clear that a total lack of anything to nail into was the problem the first cabinet had. And Noel came up with this idea where we didn't have to take ALL the drywall off, but it involved this:

Which is me holding a flashlight up while Noel jams his had down into the wall cavity to nail the stud we were putting in into place. Oh, and I was also taking a picture.

Finally we had the studs in place and were ready to put some drywall up.

After nine years in this house, we have a decent stockpile of extra drywall lying around. And we had one piece that was almost perfect. It's going to be behind a wall of cabinets, after all, so no need to be too perfect.

And we were not planning to spend time on taping and mudding this wall, given that this was just to keep the cabinet from falling off the wall. So instead we used gaffer's tape.

Oh, yeah, and Noel put up a piece of plywood from the old cabinet to cover the side of the remaining old cabinets that go around the sink.

And I assembled several cabinet carcasses in a production line with dogs and cats walking all over me.

There's our project schedule making a cameo appearance back there. At this point it was pretty much my regular bedtime, so I've kept all the bad white-balance of these photos so you can get a sense of the fun of working until midnight under fluorescent light, edgy and tired.

Hanging the cabinets went remarkably well.

The real star was the Leica laser level, which was about as awesome as you would ever want a tool to be. It was amazing to have this moment where I was like, "I wish I had a tool that could..." and then I suddenly realized I did have that tool.

And then there we were, nearly midnight, but all six of our fancy new cabinets were in place. We still need to buy doors and shelves (they had no shelves at our IKEA, and Noel didn't buy doors for reasons I don't quite understand), but we have easily tripled the amount of cabinet space we have. I can hardly reach any of it, but there is a reason why we have a stepladder in the kitchen, after all.

We tested the wainscoating in the upstairs bathroom, which turns out to come off very nicely without breaking into pieces (I didn't get any pictures, but you'll see it soon enough). We're going to start out right with a little wiring, replacing the fusebox in the front bedroom closet with a nice new breaker panel in the back of the hallway, so some of that paneling has to come off. Actually, lots of it has to come off eventually, because it's in the way of the plumbing. But we have good plans for it now that we know it can be salvaged. I'm thinking we can line the hallway walls with it on both sides.

A last-minute addition to the project is replacing the window over the front door. We're getting a new insulated glass window with hopper hinges from Wooden Window in Oakland. If things work out well with them, we'll do more windows as we get to them.

The Wooden Window people will be coming out later this week to take final measurements for the new window, so Noel got up on the ladder and took down some of the trim to prepare for them. We'll have to put a piece of plywood up in the hole while the window is being made, but it's not like what we have is actually much of a window. Once we get a cut sheet we can go to the city and find out if they consider this a repair or a replacement.

We spent some time going over our plan and rearranging the post-its, and adding more, as well. In order to do the rough wiring we need to do to replace the fuse box, I needed to figure out where lighting fixtures were going, and what kinds of loads they offer. We spent some time this weekend generating a rough lighting plan.

The red dots are where light fixtures need to go, either replacements for existing fixtures or the new installations we're planning to do. In the hallway, upstairs and down, we're planning to replace the very rudimentary fixtures with some cute little chandeliers:

In the front hallway in the entry:

In the back hallway:

And in the upstairs hall, we're thinking of something like this:

Any thoughts? I'm kind of really into the cute little mini-chandeliers as a concept, but I'm not sure how they will age, if you know what I mean.

And I'm still looking for reasonably unobtrusive ceiling lights with fans (for the required ventilation) for both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, and wall sconces for the upstairs back hallway (which is, by the way, a new hallway; previously you got into the attic through the upstairs bathroom). In a way the least showy fixtures are harder to choose: you want something that works well, but at the same time you want something that doesn't look like a big ugly piece of Home Depot oversized fake patina junk.

We're not going to order lighting for several months, thank goodness, so we don't need to commit to fixtures quite yet, but we made some decisions about it today, including a plan to put low-level lighting in the upstairs bathroom for late-night potty runs, and some intense discussion about whether to do a wall-hung toilet in the upstairs bathroom, too.

What we did order this weekend was our first piece of pocket door hardware, for the upstairs bathroom. We have the door -- the original upstairs bathroom door is going to work just fine -- but we needed the hanging part to frame out the new hallway wall up there. I think we'll also do a pocket door downstairs, but that will depend on how the measurements work out down there.

We haven't chosen the lockset for that door, but that is not a huge worry right now and we don't need to spend that money until we get to it.

We also bought a paint sprayer. I'm a little excited about it, and my first project is going to be painting the cat room, which is getting a bit of a refresh this winter. More on that when I get there.

And that's our weekend.

Then I was looking at the tasks and thinking about the walls in the hall closet that is about to become a bathroom, and I realized I didn't have any kind of accounting for if those walls -- hidden by fake wood paneling as is typical in this house -- should happen to require major work.

So I emptied the closet out completely. This was of great interest to the pets, who are generally not allowed in the closet at all.

And it had to be done at some point, anyway, so it might as well have happened today. Though I admit that we had a lot of stuff stashed in there that I was not keen on dealing with right away.

Then I took the fake wood paneling down (most of it; I left it up around the return air vent there at the end).

The condition of the walls (seen here covered in wallpaper of uncertain vintage) did not inspire confidence, so we decided to take them down now.

Also, this did not inspire me. That's a spot where the baseboard was oddly replaced with a piece of wood. The piece of wood was not attached in any way to the wall; it pulled off easily with my hands. How that came to happen, why the decision was made to put that there, I do not know. But there's something unpleasant behind there I just know it.

The drywall came down easily, mostly because it was 1/4" thick and not attached particularly well. I literally kicked part of the wall down with a sneaker-clad foot. Do not build your house like this.

I'm pretty sure that when this wall was built, this was very iffy wiring to put into it, almost as iffy as it is today. Just saying.

On the other hand, apparently somebody saw fit to build the wall over the carpet, so we're not talking about high levels of attention to detail.

We were able to narrow the date of construction of the wall down with some scraps of newspaper used as a shim against the baseboard. This comic has a date of 10-16 on it.

And this TV listing notes "Campaign '76" at 2pm.

Here's a nice piece of the floral wallpaper.

And the two kinds of flooring hidden under that wall: a piece of wood-grained linoleum, and that carpet, which must have been pretty impressive all over the hallway.

The hallway looks really different with the closet gone, but no fear: we want that downstairs bathroom badly enough that we will not be changing this plan no matter what. The remaining wall will also come down, at a time when we can handle having the heat off for a few weeks while we get a new wall up in the place of this old one. Right now we decided that piece of wall would not get in my way as I work on the plaster around the return vent.

In the meantime, we need to find some kind of temporary storage for our excessive numbers of coats, and the dog food supply (our local pet food place has a buy-three-get-one-free deal which is very worth it given the price of hippie dog food these days). I am going to buy a coat rack for the coats, and I guess for now the dog food will end up in some pantry or other.

Now I'm on to working on the hallway walls, as neglected as that project is.

1. Build the deck on the back of the house

We're looking forward to having the deck almost more than having an upstairs bathroom. OK, maybe equally. Right now to get into the back yard we go out the side door and around the dining room bay window, and while that is not really anywhere near a problem, it would be nice to just be able to go out the back door without breaking a leg. Also, we like being outside and it would be nice to have a good stable place to put a table and chairs and hang out outside in the summer.

2. Rebuild the side stairs that were removed during foundation replacement

We were reminded this weekend of how good this will be, as a friend slipped on the bad stair and nearly fell. I'm also secretly looking forward to repairing the top of the side porch and getting closer to my planned screened porch.

3. Replace the siding removed from the house during the foundation replacement

This seems like it should be so easy: just hire a dude to mill some siding for us, then nail it in place. Right. Not so easy. But we're ready for it to happen.

4. Add an electrical subpanel upstairs

This is one of those projects that just does not get enough credit. Old wiring burns houses down, and we've been systematically removing it and replacing it with good new wiring that will not burn the house down as we move through the house. We have one weird piece of wiring left: a circuit that goes from the old circuit board in the front bedroom closet, up, down, around and then out to the front porch light.

That circuit's days are numbered. Also, we will soon have a subpanel upstairs for when somebody inevitably trips a breaker with some big piece of equipment. Watch us get fat by avoiding those 1000 steps to the basement to reset the breaker.

5. New plumbing, electrical, and ventilation in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms

This is a nice one. Easily the most complicated single line item in the whole plan, and it's still just one line item.

Interestingly, the delay we experienced in getting our Japanese robot toilet post-earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster was actually outweighed by the delay we experienced in getting our permit, so the robot toilet is in the hallway waiting to be installed. I like to imaging it singing quietly to itself at night.

6. Finish cleaning and repairing the plaster in the hallway

Mostly we need to do this so the inspectors don't think we are animals (even though technically we are animals). But it is also part of the whole project, because the plumbing from the upstairs bathroom will require us to lower part of the ceiling in the hallway. (Wait, weren't we just here?) Lowering the ceiling will be easier if the ceiling is not half-falling on us to begin with. (Reminder to the Previous Owners of the world: repair water damage before covering it with drywall.)

7. Build a new coat closet in the hallway

The downstairs bathroom will deprive us of our current coat closet/dog food storage area, so we'll be building a small one in the hallway, with a pipe run in the corner to deal with drains and vents without having to undermine the structural integrity of our staircase. I have no idea what we are going to do with the bags of dog food we buy in bulk.

We don't have to do much of those projects to close out the foundation permit at long last, which we really, really want to do this year.

In addition to the Big Bathroom Project, we have a few side projects we're going to try to get done this year.

Side projects:
8. Replace the window over the front door

Noel has an appointment with a window place for Thursday to discuss this window and get a solid estimate. Some things just take a little money to make them happen.

9. Take down collapsing kitchen cabinets and replace with cheap cabinets

Over the last few months it has become apparent that one set of kitchen cabinets is detaching itself from the wall in a slow-mo collapse. We spent some time fiddling with repairing them before it dawned on us that we could just go to IKEA and buy some cheap upper cabinets which would be perfectly useful and would triple our kitchen cabinet space.

10. Finish the top of the arbor in the side yard

I swear, we'll get around to this this year.

The other part was that our personal lives had a lot of turmoil, including death, cancer, babies, and divorce, and all that was very distracting. I don't begrudge the friends who leaned on our shoulders this year at all, and I would choose them over the house again in an instant. I think if you prioritize your home renovation over the people who mean the most to you then something is wrong with you. On the other hand, people like that probably get a lot more done on their houses. Tradeoffs. We all make them.

Anyway, I'm going to rearrange this list, leaving the numbering the same as what we planned at the beginning of 2011:

1. Finish off the hallway

Yeah. We even got a couple pieces of scaffolding to make it easier. Still did not happen. But it is on the list for the next year, if only because the building inspector will not like the holes in the walls so much.

2.
a) Hard-plumb the water tank to the sump and the pump
Even before starting this one we changed the parameters, deciding to also lower the tank into the ground so we could have a shorter deck. So first I drained the tank, over several days, then in a couple of quick days I pulled the tank from the hole, deepened the hole, and reseated it.

With that done, I began working on the plumbing, but was missing a critical piece. A couple of days later, I managed to get everything connected and ready. Done!

3. Put in a front retaining wall

First I had to prune the roses. That gave us a massive pile of rose branches, so we rented a shredder for a weekend.

Then it was time to dig the trench. Which I did over a couple of weeks:

February 7: Short Retaining Walls
February 9: The Kind of Conversation We Have Often
February 9: Looking Like a Trench
February 10 : With Measurements and Everything
February 11: The Weather Will Ruin This
February 22: The Weather Was Kind
February 23: Officially Trenchlike

Then we added drainage gravel, leveled it, and tied up the rebar. Because we got smart of ordered a concrete truck, placing the concrete took less than an hour.

We built formwork and installed it just in time, because I was running out of post titles based on "form":

April 16: Formwork, Part One
April 17: Formwork, Part Two
April 23: Formwork, the Saga Continues
May 1: Gluing Lifestyle
May 7: Puts Wind in Your Formwork
May 21: Formalities
May 29: In Good Form
May 30: Fighting Form
June 2: Final Formwork

Then, suddenly, we ordered the concrete truck for another quick and easy session of placing concete. The next day we could strip off the forms and see what our new wall looked like.

Then it was just the endless, tedious job of backfilling the wall and leveling out the upper part of the front garden.

5. Stripping paint from the woodwork

It took us until December to really do much of this, but Noel has gotten back into the groove of stripping paint from a little bit of the pink trim every day. As his hair gets pinker, the house gets browner, which is a decent trade.

6. Finish chicken yard roofs

I could have sworn I made a post about this, but I can't find it. Anyway, it was fast and easy and Noel knocked this out in ten minutes one afternoon, in part because we finally decided not to build the back part we'd been planning since nothing and nobody could dive down on the chickens through that space, anyway.

7. Begin work on upstairs/under stairs bathrooms

Once we decided we would definitely do the bathrooms this year, we quickly added the drawings to our permit application, and even before we had that done we tore up the bathroom floor in a fit of energy.

When we had the permit paperwork ready, we began ordering fixtures and deciding on finishes for both rooms. But the actual work is mostly going to end up happening in 2012 because of permit issues.

That's stuff we actually worked on. This is the stuff we didn't get around to:

4. Finish the arbor in the side yard

Getting this done would have required more planning than we seemed to be capable of this year. After several abortive plans to do it "this weekend for sure" we finally ditched and gave up. We need to get to it this next year, if only because the passiflora would really like to grow over the top of the arbor.

9. Start work on the pond for the back yard

The front wall was a test run for whether we should try to build the pond ourselves. I can definitively say that we are not doing any more detailed concrete work ourselves ever again; the pond will happen, eventually, when we have the money to hire out and have it built for us.

10. Replace the window over the front door

In the last weeks of December, I finally got around to contacting window places to find out what they could do for us with that window. No return contacts or anything like that, but we have everything ready to just replace the window. As soon as we get a permit, ha ha ha.

In addition to stuff we didn't get to, there's the stuff we didn't get permits for that are part of the big bathroom project:

2. Finish the foundation permit
b) Build a deck
c) Build side stairs
d) Replace missing siding
8. Put an electrical panel upstairs

I'll go into more detail on that in our plans for 2012, but basically we have a plan, and we are already nearly a month behind on making it work out, so wish us luck.

There are a couple of things I want to clarify: we're not going to be done with this phase of the renovation when we reach year ten. People ask me that all the time, but the simple reality is that eight years ago when we sat down and made this plan, we just chose ten years out of a hat as a nice round number for some time in the not-too-distant future. We didn't know about what the economy would be like, what our professional lives would be like, and what expenses we might have to deal with in that time. We just knew that at some point in the future we wanted to do a big renovation, and there was still stuff we could do before we were financially and architecturally ready for that.

The other thing is that if we don't get this stuff done before we're ready to do the big renovation, it's really not a problem. There's no reason why we can't wrap any of these things into the larger renovation plan, unless the thing in this list is a stopgap. So we're not in any huge rush to get the last items done, and in fact as a planning tool this list is rapidly losing relevance. While it's possible we may see year twelve of the ten-year plan, I think it's even more likely that this year we will come up with a second ten-year plan of a more abstract nature.

Anyway, this is what we had planned, and notes on what we did. (If it's stricken without comment, we finished it in a previous year.)

1. Paint exterior of house
2. Finish living rooms
3. Foundation replacement (Yes, we're still closing the permit, but the foundation is solid)
4. Remove Fright Box under house, redo plumbing
5. Redo upstairs bath and add half bath under stairs
   We finally got our permits to do this work, after several months of working with the city to make it happen.
6. Remove chimney, replace furnace thing
7. Install gas fireplace in living room
   We decided this year not to put the small fireplace in the upstairs bedroom. Mainly because it would encroach on the living space so much, and for what? We'll already have two fireplaces in the house when we finish the big renovation, and a bedroom fireplace is not so sexy in a 12-ft square bedroom.
8. Re-roof (Alternative approach taken)
9. Insulate crawlspace and attic
   After some research, we've decided to do this project this year as part of the bathroom and electrical work we got a permit for.
10. Remove fake wooden panelling, stabilize plaster, and repaint all rooms
    We basically didn't do that much with this this year. The big outstanding project is the hallway, on which we made zero progress.
11. Block air infiltration around various doors (as done as it can get)


12. Replace window sashes (Moved off the 10-year plan because of logistics)
13. Strip ugly pink paint from as much woodwork as possible
    Last year we thought we might hire somebody to do this, but the person we thought we might hire was then suddenly un-recommended to us. Instead, Noel has been doing small amounts of paint stripping with the heat gun.
14. Remove linoleum from floors/refinish wooden floors
    We didn't do anything with this this year, there will be some of it in the big bathroom project.
15. Remove the concrete driveway extension into the back yard


16. Related landscaping/gardening


17. Repair front porch/re-rebuild front steps
18. Repair side porch, remove steps, and turn into a conservatory
    The permit we just got includes new stairs for the side porch, and we may repair the porch deck as well while we are at it (the structure underneath has already been repaired, but the weird OSB the previous owners put down over the porch boards reached the end of its useful life a good long time ago).
19. Draw detailed plans for the Day of Glory
    

In the meantime, I bought a few more fruit trees this week. I meant to earlier this season but got distracted by other projects.

I only (only!) bought three trees this year: a couple of dwarf plums and a new quince. They will all go out front, the quince in the smaller side of the upper part of the front, and the two plums along the streetscape. I'd be more concerned about pilfering if I were more fond of plums, but I'm quite content to only have a few each year and share them with the people who pass by. (This is not an invitation to come steal plums, by the way.)

The plums I got are a pair of European plums, Golden Transparent Plum and Parfumé de Septembre. They are both self-fertile, but will do better with each other than alone, I think. My experience with self-fertile trees is that they do OK alone, but for really spectacular results you need the nearby cross-pollinator.

(Which reminds me, I must remember to get another cherry to graft onto my Lambert to pollinate it, because it blooms out of synch with the other two and has never produced any fruit at all.)

The quince we got to replace our old fireblighted quince is Ekmek, which is the Turkish word for bread. Ekmek is a Western Turkish quince, medium sized and sweet for a quince. The old quince was Havran, another Turkish variety, extremely large and prone to nearly killing you by dropping a five-pound quince on your head as you weeded under it. I'm looking forward to trying the new variety.

I ordered from Raintree Nursery (where the links above go), so I got some free raspberries and strawberry plants as well, and on impulse I threw in some Orchard Mason bees, so we can go all-out and have a beefest in the garden this year. Not that I lack for pollinators; my project of attracting native bees has been very successful, plus there are several local beekeepers whose girls come hang out in my garden all summer long. But you know. I always meant to order some Orchard Mason bees and never got around to it until it was too late in the season.

He'd stripped this piece of trim, though the top came off when we were removing it so it needed a little repair.

This is the place it needed to go. The small crack here leads directly down into the basement, and anything that gets dropped or shed on the floor rains down on our storage racks below. We wanted to put the trim back to make that stop, or at least slow down.

Noel cut the top of the bottom board level so that he could make a clean repair, then screwed the board in place.

We don't have 150-year-old heart redwood lying around, so he made a patch with a piece of plywood. At some point we are getting most of our trim remilled, but this will do for now, especially once it is painted.

It's not exactly pretty, but it does the job. The wood trim in this house is pretty trashed; this is actually one of the better pieces. This was always paint-grade wood, though these days paint grade means something much yuckier than in 1876. Anyway, we'll paint it white and it won't look quite so horrible.

Today I lined everything up on a tarp outside to paint. You don't have to paint your woodenware, but it will last longer and look better if you do. Some people dip their woodenware in a preservative oil, but I don't have enough stuff to do to make that worthwhile to set up. Painting is cheaper and easier to set up, though I admit that it can be pretty tedious.

Instead I went down to Pagano's and picked up a can of cheap paint. Most paint or hardware stores will have a shelf full of messed-up colours or returned paint, super cheap. It's perfectly functional, just not the right colour for whatever reason. This gallon of paint, normally more like $50, was marked down to $6. Sure, it's not quite the colour I would have picked, but you can't beat the price.

But first I primed everything. I guess I didn't need to; the paint was cheaper than the primer. But I find this Zinsser primer we use all the time keeps tannins in the wood from leaking through the paint, so I put a layer down.

The purple paint dries a lot more slowly than the primer, so I got only one coat on each piece done before it started getting too dark to paint effectively. Then I moved everything into the basement to keep it out of the fog, because one of my favourite hobbies is carrying large wooden boxes up and down stairs.

I'll probably finish the painting on a tarp downstairs. It's just one more coat all around, plus I like to do the top and bottom edges of each hive body, even though the bees will gunk it all up with propolis. Then I'll get to spend the rest of the winter assembling frames. Woo hoo.

It's been very cold and clear lately, for long enough that we knew the weather would change soon.

There wasn't much left to be done: painting over some nails, and trimming the edge of the board. And installing the drip edge which will hopefully help deflect some water.

It's all kind of horrifying back there. A lot of times with a house like this you have to make a decision between just sort of limping along and spending the real money to do things right. Doing things right means completely rebuilding the roof--as soon as we start taking things apart to properly deal with that edge we get into Victorian framing that is just not adequate by modern codes.

As it is, this new edge should keep the weather out a little better than an open hole (we can actually tell the difference upstairs, so that is good news), and it will definitely keep bees out, which is a big yay, since bees in the attic are not fun.

And then last night it got warm and humid and the rain started. Good timing.

My hives arrived from Brushy Mountain. I got a couple of 8-frame medium hives with cute little copper roofs. The hive bodies came assembled, but I still need to make a bunch of frames up, and paint the outside of everything.

The cats were very interested in the proceedings. Or at least the four very large boxes and the packing paper.