I tweeted the other day that I found my yard. For those of you not living in the upper midwest, you may not realize that we had a LOT of snow on the ground this year. From the 5th of December until basically the 5th of March, I never got a look at my yard, save for the snow cover.
Yesterday, I actually walked out into my yard for the first time in those three months. Did so again this morning, this time making a cursory inspection of things, starting to determine all the things I’ll need to get done in the next month or so. Here’s what I learned.
The dog is hard on the yard. There is, shall we say, a substantial amount of evidence scattered about the yard as to the presence of our dog this winter.
As a corollary to point #1, the dog was very hard on one of my downspouts. I think she thought it was the lair of a delicious squirrel and as such tried to extract the tasty rodent. This led to a slight incursion of moisture into our basement. Thankfully, I have home repair skills, and I made what should be the permanent repair to said downspout.
My garden makes me sad in March. Oh, how I long to walk barefoot to my garden on a humid night and bring back approximately eight thousand dollars worth of fresh basil. Alas, the salad days, as they were, are still months away.
The fence gate that I thought I properly engineered? I failed gate engineering. It requires a pretty substantial rebuild.
I have a surface grade problem at my foundation. Also, I need to get some ground cover going to mitigate erosion.
None of these are really giant issues. The thing is, when you have a piece of paper that says “Bachelor of Landscape Architecture”, there really isn’t any excuse for any of this other than laziness. I’m pretty well beyond the pressure to have my yard look beautiful, but I’d at least like it to not be falling apart.
Posted 4 months, 1 week ago at 10:31 am. Add a comment
Here’s some recent work I did – worked with the architect and interior designer of this space to help visualize what a proposed tenant build-out of a space would look like.
Fun stuff. This is a great example of finding the sweet spot of complexity and technical challenge, and blending it with the budget and timeline that the client has. We could have put 400% more time and budget into it, and gotten decent results, but the client wouldn’t have been able to afford it, and we would have had 100% less revenue from the project.
That being said, here is this nice little interior fly-through.
Last Saturday, we had family pictures taken. Nice, relaxed, outdoorsy, family pictures. Took a little over an hour.
This took pretty much all the kids had, in terms of good behavior. By the end, we were reverting to the “smile or you’ll be punished” method of taking pictures. The thing is, how did families get PAINTINGS of their kids 200 years ago? To get a kid to sit still long enough to be painted? No wonder nobody was smiling.
We had to promise the kids we wouldn’t do it again for a long time.
Nobody likes having their pictures taken. Everyone likes seeing the pictures.
<– This is a representation of my thoughts on my taxation.