Tag: home improvement

Garden Planning 2021

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I’ve been planning my 2021 garden since fall and have altered the plans several times. It’s important to keep a record of your plans, and I so far have 5 sketches for my 2021 garden dating back to September. This year will be my second year with a garden, and I’m planning for a 3 season garden. This means I have plans for all seasons, Spring, Summer, and Fall, and plans on what goes well together and what will go in once one stops producing. With this planning also comes many decisions. I have decided to start everything from seeds except what doesn’t use seed. I have also decided to use two new small raised beds and to use two more fabric pots than last year, however since I flipped the beds this fall, I only have one of the five bags I need filled. I’ll also be figuring out how to fill them early this spring. The soil is very compact here and not very fertile. We do have a compost bin, but it is much too small to be a hot pile, so though there is some dirt at the bottom, it will take a very very long time before I’ll get any significant compost from it.

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The Plans

As I mentioned these plans have changed and evolved over time. The first things I did when planning my garden were to make a list of all the vegetables we eat a lot of and we feel would be a fun challenge for the next year. I also sketched out a layout for the garden. Then I began to place the plants I really wanted into the sketch accounting for plant spacing. Then, when you get to your last few plants you have to make the decision of what you want to plant this year. Take into account, how much you currently have stored, how often you eat it, and if you will have the means to store certain vegetables over an extended period of time.

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Once your vegetables are picked, you can tweak your plans over the span of a few weeks. However, when you finally are set on what you plan to grow, be sure to order seeds! Seeds are in a higher demand than normal and it could take a while to get seeds or for them to come back in stock. Beyond that, it will just be deciding when you can plant things, and what can be planted once one plant is ready to be pulled. For example, I already have my garlic in the ground and it came up before the hard freeze came, so I know that will be planted until late July when it will be time to harvest. After that, I will plant beets. I denoted that by a “/” on my sketch. I have several other plants I will be doing that with, I plant to plant Peas, once it gets warm, pull the peas and plant green beans, then come August/September, I’ll be able to plant a second planting of peas. I’ll be doing the same thing with my second new bed, but with two plantings of broccoli and one planting of cabbage. I also Plant to plant potatoes once the ground is warm, and once they are harvested, I will be planting Spinach in the fall. I am in zone 6A, so my timeline will likely be different than yours, however I hope you were able to get some helpful information.

Some possible questions you may have, I’ll try and answer before hand, but feel free to ask any questions you might have down in the comments. I’ll just hop into it. The circles not within a rectangle/square are my fabric pots. I plan to plant one with horseradish, two with sweet potatoes, and two with potatoes and spinach. The rectangles on the left side of the page are 4ft x 8ft beds that are 12 inches deep. These are the beds I started with last year. The square beds on the right of the page will be 4 ft x 4 ft beds, though they have not been constructed yet. There is also a possibility for another 4 ft x 8 ft bed for onions, but that will only happen if the cost of lumber comes down significantly before May. Most people in my area have a consensus not to plant anything in the ground before Memorial Day, however, plants like peas and broccoli are very cold hardy, so their spring planting will probably go into the ground beginning to mid-May. The picture above of dates and veggies underneath will be the days I will have to start my plants inside. For them, I will probably be starting them at the end of the time frame, just so they don’t get too big, if I do have to wait until mid- or late May before planting. What else… I will be planting two rows of tomatoes, and I’ll be doing one variety per row. I will also be planting both banana peppers and bell peppers in my pepper row. I have tons on Marigold seeds, so I’ll be starting them in every flower bed around my house, and I also learned to get them in the ground super early, or they won’t sprout. I learned the same with dill last year.

That’s all I can think to clarify. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below! Thanks for reading!

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Home Update

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated on how the house is going. So far we haven’t been able to do any more new flooring. The holidays and winter in general has made it hard for us to continue that project. Our next flooring room will be to add the new flooring into the orange room’s closet, then we’ll be doing the hallway and hall closet as our second segment. We are still trying to make decisions on whether we can do the living room and dining room together or whether we have to add a threshold, or if it would be easier to add one. Our living room is about 14 ft by 16 ft, and our dining room is about 9 ft by 7 ft.

Otherwise, we have been working on projects. We’ve updated our kitchen light, dining room light, and hall light. We’ve also bought a new bathroom faucet and push drain. We were able to get these accomplished in a weekend and it was just a small project to keep us busy at home. We’ve been busy doing some work for family lately. Josh has been building a server for a business, and we’ve had a few smaller projects we’ve been dealing with. Josh also bought a 3D printer, the Ender 3 Pro, so we’ve been fiddling with that most recently.

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Master Bedroom Flooring and Transformation

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If you’ve been following for a while, you may remember that at the beginning of quarantine, my husband and I bought flooring. We bought enough flooring for the entire house, and if you want to read more about that, you can find it here.

Up until now, I have only posted our guest room being done, however, we had also started our master room, and now it is finished. The process we went through was the same as our guest room, so if you would like to visit that, you can by clicking here.

Differences with our master was, I painted the walls before I painted the floor, and the floor was in much worse condition than the guest room. There was quite a bit of mold/mildew on the bottom of the underlayment. The underlayment was also much different from the guest room with a plastic coated foam instead of the exposed porous foam that was in the guest room. Many floor tiles were also loose, but they all sealed back down with the coating of sealant paint. The only other hiccups that occurred doing this room where the fact that the walls were never primed, so in one spot when we were removing the painter’s tape, the old paint pulled off the wall in two small spots, and since the first row of flooring wasn’t perfectly straight and we were tapping boards a lot more than last time, we were having trouble getting the boards to lock together fully about 3/4 of the way through.

Removing Old Carpet

Painting Walls, Chipped Out Cement Edge, and Filling with New Flat Cement

Twice Cleaned and Sealed Floor

Laid Underlayment

New Bed and Newman

Laying New Flooring

Added Base Boards and New Curtains

Final Move In

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Garden Amending and Planting Garlic

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If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen the post I added yesterday about planting garlic. This is the first year I am seriously trying to grow garlic, and so I’ve done a lot of research and I’m very excited to see what I can get. But, isn’t this garlic gorgeous! I bought these three varieties, all three are organic, disease free, and heirloom varieties. These varieties cam from MIGardener.com. They are not a sponsor, and many varieties are sold out or selling out fast. With that out of the way, before I could plant my garlic, I first had to pull my remaining plants from my raised beds and fabric bags. With this, I was able to save several Parris Island lettuce seeds. I will include those steps at the bottom of this post. I then amended my raised beds, then I planted my garlic.

My first frost day is only 2 weeks away when I planted the garlic yesterday. It is recommended planting garlic at least 3 weeks before first frost, but we just got over a cold snap yesterday where we had 4 nights of frost. The weather is calling for warm temperatures for the next week, so I’m taking a gamble that we won’t be getting another frost for a couple more weeks.

To amend my beds, I first pulled all my plants, but my marigolds. It was just a personal choice to keep them. I think they are beautiful and have a lot of life left in them, so it didn’t feel right pulling them yet, so I just worked around them. To make up for this, I will add some fertilizer in their place next spring to add more nutrients in those spots. Once I pulled the plants, I then pulled down all my netting. This made it easier to move the soil around. Our beds are 8 ft by 4 ft and pressure treated. We added in one fabric bag to one bed and two fabric bags to the other bed. We then split a bag of peat moss between the two beds. We also added 2 bags of aged cow manure into each bed and mixed it all into the top 4 inches of each bed. The reason we added the fabric bags was because the dirt in them had a lot of clay and dried out very quickly. We added 2 bags to one bed because the soil in that second bed was very poor, so we wanted more organic matter in the bed, so we added more dirt. You could also add potting soil if you needed to fill your beds more, but potting soil is expensive, so if top soil were an option, it would be better. I aim for a ratio of 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost/manure, and 1/3 top soil for a healthy and balanced soil.

  • Plant garlic rows 6 inches apart
  • Plant garlic cloves 6 inches apart in a row
  • Place garlic cloves 2-3 inches under ground
  • Cover garlic with 4-6 inches of hay or mulch before your first frost
  • Plant garlic at least 3 weeks before your first frost to allow time for root development before they go into dormancy
  • Place chicken wire/hardware cloth over your beds to prevent animals from digging
  • Uncover garlic once risk of frost has passed
  • Water garlic often in the fall and spring and fertilize often in the spring and summer; garlic is a heavy feeder
  • Garlic is ready once the outer 1-2 leafs are dead and dry, any more than that and the garlic won’t dry and will just rot instead

Parris Island lettuce makes yellow flowers, that once fertilized become white fluffs with seeds attached. To get the seed, simply remove the heads that have already gone to seed, remove the stem, then remove the fluff from the seed. You only need a few flowers to get lots of seeds.

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Garage Side Door

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We started this project near the end of June, and by early July we had everything done but painting the trim. Though I like to make a post whenever we do a project, I am learning to wait until the entire project is done instead of posting when everything is “mostly” done. So, the end of August, we got some exterior paint and were able to finish this project. We’ve been working on other projects almost constantly, so it was something we had to get back around to.

Lustron garages are similar to the house, but there are some construction differences. For example, the house is entirely steel construction, whereas the garage is all wood construction. This made it much easier for us to add the door. The panels are the same between the house and the garage. The panels are attached in only three corners, and what keeps it together is the panels being nested. from the front, the panels are bolted on the left corners and the right top corner. When the wall was assembled, it was assembled from the left bottom corner to the right top corner. The metal shingles are also the same as the house, however the roof design is different. Lustron garages were a secondary thought to this company, and most of the time were just assembled by some contractor the way they would build any other structure. For that reason, you will find must more variation between garages than houses. With that out of the way, you can look through how we added our door. We bought a previously owned steel door for $15 that came with hinges, but was not hung. We would have liked a door that was already hung, however we didn’t want to spend a fortune on a door either, so we went with what we could find, I painted it, and we attached to a door frame that we made ourselves.

The first thing we did was figure out where-ish we wanted our opening. We had originally planned to more the door so there were two existing panels between the door and the corner. We knew we’d have to move our electrical if we did that, but there would be enough room for the upright freezer and some storage shelves. When we pulled down the wall and could see the footer, there was already an original foundation anchor in it, and though we may have been able to remove it, we didn’t want to mess with the original structural integrity. Before you pull down your wall, you will need to find your studs, but once you do, you can tear out anything in the wall, in our case it was insulation, and clean your work space.

We decided to move the door a segment to the left, and Josh began cutting. As I mentioned earlier, since the panels were assembled a special way, we had to disassemble a special way. Using a sawzall, Josh was able to fit the blade between the panels and studs to cut the bolts. Once all a panel’s bolts were cut, it could just slide right out. We did end up damaging a few panels this way, but many of these panels were severely rusted and some even rusted through. Once that was done, we cut out the existing stud and cross support, and cut the existing footer in the door way to make room for a new threshold.

Once the opening was done, it was all framing and adding the door. First, we added our threshold, and added on anchor into the cement. Then we rough framed the door. We gave ourselves an extra 3 inches for the door and roughed in the opening. We made spacer blocks then added our 2x4s up to the header. There we added shorter 2x4s that were slightly higher than the door, and nailed them to the existing 2x4s. This whole time before we nailed anything, we were adjusting the boards to be as close to level and as close to square as we could get. We added a top plate to the shorted boards and attached it. We added some smaller pieces to attach that to the actual header, then we called it a day because our we found out our well switch had broken (thankfully we keep a spare). We added plywood for the night and got back to it a few days later. We then cut the door frame, cutting the sides before the top, shimmed it in place then nailed it. We added our final threshold and then we took a few more days off before returning. When we came back, we hung the door. First, holding the door where it would be if it were open, we marked the hinge locations. We had enough room that we didn’t have to set in the hinges, but you may have to do that if your space is too tight. Josh pre-drilled the holes, and I held the door as he attached each hinge.

Josh then cut our top trim piece and mounted it, then he cut and mounted each side piece. We added new hardware to the door, and spray foamed around the framing of the door. We left it like that until I was able to paint the trim to finish the project.

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