The Conundrum of L'Nursery Un, Part One.

So I have the feeling that this is going to end up being a quasi-series of posts about a lot more things than just a single space in my house, but we're going to just start at the beginning and see where it goes.

It's been a long time since I've properly addressed Duder's room, a perennial work in progress since the day we found out he was nine months away from turning our lives upside down. His addition, actually, is pretty much what spawned the majority of the projects we've tacked since -- in order to make space for him (and later, his sister) we had to get some serious work done around here.

But in all the hubbub of renovations and diagnoses and added children/cats/stray dogs [nope, no owner found yet ...] Kiedis' room has really kind of fallen into shambles. 

For the most part, it has to do with the floor.

It is the only space in the house where the parquet remains. 

It also is an effing train wreck.

As this blurry-action-shot of me karate-chopping the floor right in front of the doorway into the room illustrates, we have ourselves a hazardous situation.

And more often than not, for reasons that span a lack of time and give-a-damn to some very delicate complexities we'll get into in a later post, this little tract of floor is more likely to appear as such:

And there are a handful of spots exactly like this throughout his room, mostly in the main foot traffic thoroughfares, waiting to pinch/stab/splinter/slash/etc your foot when you least expect it.

It's truly atrocious.

This is only flanked by the severe variance of the floor actually meeting up with the walls of the room:

The hodge-podged trim chunks pretending to be baseboard:

And the terrifyingly unsafe electrical work that we're basically blessed that little fingers have never explored:

THERE'S NO BOX. JUST AN EFFING PLUG AND SOME WIRES IN THE MOTHER EFFING WALL.

There's also another outlet that used to work but suddenly stopped one day and despite switching out the plug housing it still doesn't work, so lord knows what that actually means.

And, lest we forget, the closet project we started back when this was our bedroom that has been fairly much untouched since 2007:

And it's pretty safe to say that Kiedis' room is quite the cluster.

Now, I know some of you must be horrified that we even let a child in this room at all, never mind assign it to him as a bedroom, but all along choices have been made based on what was at the time best for him and as he's grown and we've learned more and more about his hurdles and complications his room has borne more than it's fair share of the brunt of those revelations and struggles.

But that's something I'll get into a little more later on.

Life, Interrupted.

You guys, I have so much I want to talk to you about, it's actually causing me to spazz out a bit because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it all down before I forget it.

But then, then sometimes a puppy comes bounding up to your husband out of nowhere and is obviously well taken care of but without identification, so you spend your time trying to get a young dog that loves men, small children, other dogs, and is passionately curious about cats, home.

If you're local and recognize this pup, shoot me a line. If all you see is a sweet face, please spread the word. My heart is breaking knowing a family is missing it's new best friend.

We'll get back to house stuff next week.

Backyard Dreams, The Tour.

Okay, this post won't make sense unless you look at Tuesday's post, so scroll on down, take a peek, then come back.

It was supposed to be one big long post, but I was summoned to Kiedis' preschool and had to bathe and you all are terribly bored by this story but it involves baby chickens and them being terrified of my son while he was enthralled by them and yeah, intervention.

So.

On to a SketchUp tour of what I think maybe I want my backyard to look like.

As you recall, this is the mock up of what I think it could look like, from an aerial view, with my house being at the bottom.

I had fun learning how to make thing 3D in SketchUp, so bear with me, because we're essentially going to step into the model.

Let's start from right out the back door, where things change very little.

This is essentially the set up we already have for the part of the yard directly out the back door, along the fence with the easement and power lines. The main difference would be tearing up the weird concrete slab out the back door and creating a grid of sunken pavers for us to put our already-owned lawn furniture on without them sinking into the ground. Those would stretch from essentially the back door to the raised garden beds, and would leave enough space for the chiminea to be lit at a comfortable distance from the furniture. I think we measured a rough six feet from the fence line, which here the chain link has been replaced with privacy fence with lattice trim. So basically a patio without all the visual weight of a deck or solid pavers, so it doesn't feel even smaller than it is.

If you were to step out my back door, then turn to the right, you'd be facing west (and the redneck neighbor's spotlights). Right now, there's a 4ft high rusted metal chicken wire fence separating our yard from our elderly neighbor's yard. In my mind, I'd like that to look more like this:

We'll start with a privacy fence with lattice trim along the top because I like to be fancy. To the right in this image is the back gate, which we need to replace with matching fencing and gate. We're going to tear up the terrible concrete job they've done along the back of the house, but a stepping stone would be good for when you first enter the yard (I think). To the left of the image is where there is now an awful chain link fence with those metal slats woven into it, and to sort of block that out without building a fence inside of a fence, we're thinking a lattice screen and a small rock garden in front of it, partially encompassing the magnolia tree we planted a couple of years ago. This is the widest part of the yard, so if we were ever to get a swing set for the kids, this would be the place for one.

Okay, now if you were entering my backyard from the gate or basically standing with my house directly behind you, you'd see something like this:

The white siding there is my back neighbor's garage (which we can't do anything about) and here you can more clearly see what I mean about the lattice in front of the slat-filled chain link. Where you see a white platform we currently have just a small concrete slab that we think maybe has something to do with the gas lines, so we're leaving it. The white platform is a kind of small deck, big enough for a couple of lounge chairs or a dog house or a kid's plastic playhouse or something of that nature. It'd be flanked by the raised garden beds and the rock garden, so really just about anything could go there. And if we ever got a projector (and could block out the spotlights) we'd put it there, on the garage, so this gives us a clean, defined space that otherwise we can't do a whole hell of a lot with.

Lastly, if you were standing by the magnolia tree with the garage behind you, you'd be looking at my house, which is this-ish:

I want to replace our current back door with a more inviting French door, because what we have right now is very ... ugly and cold and it has a weird peephole and why does your back door need a peephole? Then we'd make or get one of those little screen covers for around the non-functioning A/C unit so it wasn't so big and ugly in the middle of the yard. Now, the backyard actually slopes slightly down towards the swing set (in these drawings) so I'm not sure how plausible a flower bed would be right there, but it does get a ton of sun throughout the day and it's a whole lot of house with nothing really going on save for that one tiny little kitchen window. I thought a flower bed with big bushes or something could look really pretty, but I really don't know. Also, not drawn in, would be a small storage shed to the farthest left, kind of behind the swing set on the inside of the gate, so we could have a place to put away our various outside tools.

So basically, that's it, however horribly explained. 

Now if only I could convince Kyle that something like this could totally work back here as well (since seeing it yesterday morning pretty much changed my life) then I think we'd be all set. Oh, and also a pergola, somewhere, because reasons.

Anyway, thoughts, comments, criticisms, volunteers?