Projectitus

Karen's gazebo and the newly painted fountain.  

Pet's sunroom project in progress

Karen

I don’t know about you Pet, but the second the first week of Spring hits I get projectitius. I become a list fiend. With the first holiday of the season a month away I start to make my home improvement lists. Somehow the bright spring light only seems to highlight the deferred maintenance from the winter blues. Here in sunny California, all the flowers are blooming and once again the outdoors calls. That means I better spruce up the lawn furniture and get ready for unannounced neighbors to come over for a little glass of Pinot Noir in the backyard gazebo. The same gazebo that is currently covered in cobwebs and has dirt an inch thick on the floor.

Pet

Gone are the days when you wanted change in the homestead you simply sold the one you have and bought a new one. Feeling lucky to have a house at all, we’re diving into projectitus! Great word, Karen Anne. We usually start with the friendly place, the front porch. The chairs come out of the garage, hopefully don’t need painting, and are set in conversational mode. Big planters border the edge. A few tables for drinks and small planters join them. Frost warnings over, so next come the geraniums highlighted with tumbling petunias. Red geraniums with white petunias?  Or all shades of pink. Whatever the color scheme, the front porch cries for geraniums and petunias.

Karen

I wish my projects were as simple as planting flowers. My main project is restoring my porches. All three of them! Although my house is a new Victorian built in 2003, my porches are from a house built in 1890 that was torn down because of the Northridge earthquake. Due to some shoddy painting by the builder, the hundred plus wood has been splitting and cracking every year. This year chunks started to fall off and I had to bump the porches up to number one on the project list. The back porch is also made from parts of the old Victorian and due to my brilliant idea of wrapping my wisteria vines around the posts the paint has literally been pulled off by the vine. Word of advice, don’t let a pretty vine fool you; they can cause hell when you’re not looking!

Pet

Flowers are great for covering structural sins when one is too lazy to redo whole areas. You, Karen Anne, are the ambitious type who gets to the root of the problem. Yup vines can be uber troublesome. Here in the south we have a vine that resembles a grapevine, called kudzu. The pretty leaves pop out as a first sign of spring. But then the vine grows and grows and grows. By midsummer they envelop all nearby trees, bushes and deserted buildings. Kudzu overgrowths spring up everywhere. The darn things are unkillable. The city of Chattanooga has a unique idea. They hire a herd of hungry goats who are able to eat kudzu as fast as it grows and at least keep the vines off of the highway. Idea: How about acquiring a herd of goats to trim back your wisteria? 

Karen

I think the Pasadena police would have something to say about goats grazing in my yard! Then again the neighbors kids would think I hired a petting zoo. : ) Planting vines sure is tempting but sometimes you just have to break down and do good old manual labor mainly to keep guests from falling through the floorboards. : ) Of course my city friends think I’m crazy to work on the porches myself. But I have the skills and no one will give them the attention that I will lavish on them. I have to admit I sure would rather be doing something fun like decorating my front parlor. But ask anyone who has an old wood porch, and they’ll tell you, porches are always begging for attention just like kids. Lol

Pet

At our modern house the back porch was actually a deck. The view was great, the furniture comfy, location totally convenient connecting the breakfast nook with the backyard and the bordering wild life habitat. The big problem was the deck faced west, bringing cool mornings and sweltering afternoons. So the front porch was, and is, where we sit. Temps great out front, but instead of communing with nature, we watch the neighbors and wave at the cars speeding by. Ah, but that view of the yard and the wildlife culminating in the ever changing landscape of the Holsteins grazing on the ridge was simply to good to waste. So, Madam Devoted Decorator, tell me what project we should have undergone, and then I’ll tell you what we did.

Karen

Sounds like your deck needs a roof! How about putting up a gazebo? Worked wonders for my backyard problem area. We have a nice brick patio behind the garage that we never used till last year. The reason? We have a 100-year-old scrub oak tree that sheds it’s leaves year round. These aren’t just any old leaves; no, they have razor edges and sharp spines. You can imagine how much fun it was to hang out under it's very large and deadly canopy. Not! The solution came to me one day, a gazebo!!!! It’s been like heaven ever since. We are shielded from the killer tree and the gazebo almost feels like a tree house snuggled under the large tree branches. My neighbors love it and that’s where everyone wants to hang out in the summer. Turned a dead space into a popular hangout. Get yourself a gazebo!

Pet

A gazebo sounds great and I love the way they look. I picture a gazebo at one end and a hot tub at the other. A door from the master bedroom/bath leads on to the porch/deck. Woops, I mean ex deck. What we did was construct a sunroom on top of the deck, gorgeous sunny spot, and safe from the elements. We have a great time during all seasons checking out the wildlife, mostly deer, turkeys and bunnies, but every bird imaginable.  The Holsteins graze on the hillside, rain, shine and below zero. When guests come for dinner they fight over the table in the sunroom. Not a simple solution, but it worked for us! What fun if we can manage to look out at a gazebo.

Uh oh…I feel an attack of projectitus coming on.

Karen

: ) Tis the season! I just finished a side project not even on my list. But the idea has been floating around in my head. I managed to finally score a great deal on a fountain for the backyard by the gazebo. There is a small wall mounted fountain on the back of the garage but it hardly makes a sound. Not the nice splashy ambiance I was hoping for. So I found a nice medium sized fountain high off the ground (we have raccoons) only problem was it was a horrible cream-colored fake stone. No problem for a decorating maven like me. They make wonderful fake stone spray paints so I found a nice dark granite color that matches my green and black theme.  Always have to have a theme. Lol Now that the fountain is painted, it looks like a one that would cost twice as much. The neighbors are going to be thrilled by the new ambiance while they down their mojitos!    

Pet

Fountains are nice but how about a whole pond spanned by a scenic bridge and some bright colored fish splashing below? One of our relatives built such an outdoor delight and if we can lure him down to our place, we’ll beg, bribe or threaten him until he builds a water place for us. We even have a water supply, a babbling brook hidden in the trees. The birds would love this addition. If only I were as ambitious as you! I’d be out there right now digging away. Actually we’d lure a farm neighbor with a back hoe to dig the hole soon to become the scenic fishpond. We have the acreage, now we need to catch Karen Anne’s ambition. Maybe if we promised relatives and neighbors unlimited mojitos, they’d grab a shovel and dig in. For the tee-totalers, we’d whip up unlimited supplies of those California death by chocolate brownies. Shamefacedly I must admit…to us projectitus is like a case of the flu. We lay low until the urge goes away!

Karen

Maybe I need a twelve-step program to cure me of projectitus. Instead I’ll be heading out to work on my porches. They are my major project for the year so I’ll be thrilled to get the worst off my list. Wish I felt a case of the flu coming on. : )

Happy Projectitus Everyone! 

(until they find a cure)