Lost Garden

When we moved in the gardens had not been touched since they took pictures to sell the house. They had mowed the lawns but had left the vegetable garden in the yard and flower gardens along the borders alone. There are still projects to work on in the house but we will tackle those later in July. Since the house is mostly in order we decided to put some effort into the yards.

One of the things we did was to find the lost garden. It was dug into the side yard and comes out even with the fence. It had 2 blueberry bushes in it when we bought it but the renters dug up one and took it with them. Bad!!!! The seller's relator bought us a new one. They also took some other plants but since I can't identify them they are history. There is also some strawberry plants, a viola, 2 rose bushes, and LOTS of grass/weeds in the garden. It took us 4 days to find the garden...here it is



I don't know the name of all the plants at our new house so I spent a few hours at a local nursery identifying some of the plants so I could take better care of them. This is just a list of some of the plants:
Calla Lilies
Salvia, purple
Rhododendrons
Sedum (stonecrop), Autumn Joy
Japanese Aralias, Japanese Paper Plants
Primroses
Columbines
Lupines
Heavenly Bamboo
Clematis, Piilu
Peonies
Bleeding Hearts
Daylilies
Lilies
Wintercreeper, Emerald "n Gold
various bulbs
Hydrangeas
Lavender
Spider Plants
Hostas
Daisies
various ferns
Irises
Camilla
Roses-I counted 26 plants!
8 Pine trees
Volunteer Cherry trees-they are coming out and other fruit trees will take their place
Weeping Cherry tree-also coming out
Beech Tree-also coming out
Maple Tree
various bushes yet to be identified

I won't put up pictures of all those plants but here are some pictures of the roses. Some pictures I took while they were blooming on the bushes. And some pictures are just some that I picked. You can see some of the different varieties of roses in the bouquets. I can pick 1 or 2 bouquets a week and still have roses to look at on the bushes!

 






More pictures and stories to come.

Pictures of adventures

These were taken at Tryon State Park, it's in the middle of Portland. The Portland area has a lot of parks in the middle of the cities.




These were taken on our trip to Fort Stevens. A picture on an old battery, and a picture of the shipwreck, Peter Iredale. The star fish were huge!





A trip to Silver Falls was well worth it! You can walk behind many of the waterfalls.

Moving in to our house. As you can see we have 2 helpers! More pictures of the house to come.

OCD

Its commonly known amongst my friends that I'm a person with OCD tendencies. It's starting to catch up with me again. Now that we have a house to live in, I'm getting picky about things. My current fetish is cleanliness. As previously stated, sellers here don't put much effort into fixing things about their houses. I'm not talking about huge things, like roofs, siding, plumbing issues, I'm taking about things that should be done on a regular basis but are not done. I'm spending an inordinate amount of time taking care of things that should be "small jobs", like cleaning the bathroom (3 hours for one and 2 hours for the other), cleaning the fridge (2 hours), cleaning the stove top (1 day and counting). The inside of the window jams are dirty, that's going to take days. I figure in another 2 weeks I'll have it much cleaner, and OCD friendly!

Moving in

Moving in day was last week. My son-in-law came over to help. We needed his help moving some very heavy pieces of furniture and replacing the wax ring on a toilet. He stayed and helped empty the whole POD. It was cloudy and cool for most of the day and we did have an occasional rain shower, it turned out to be great weather for moving in.
Within 9 days we have managed to move most of our stuff in this house. Before moving we purged our possessions in order to fit what we thought we needed into our POD. Now that we are unpacking our possessions I'm wondering if we can purge some more. Two reasons draw me to this conclusion: I've lived without these things for 6+ months and I haven't missed some of it, and we moved from a 1354 square foot house to a 1060 square foot house-less space for what we thought we needed. So I think I will be purging again.
We also had to buy some things. We had set aside money for these purchases, it was just a matter of agreeing on what to buy. Curtains, rugs, shelving, a kitchen cart, were some of the bigger items. We will be waiting to purchase some things, looking on line at my free cycle group, or my buy nothing group, or FB marketplace to find items. It would be nice to have more seating in the living room. And I just realized that we have never bought a new couch, they have always been used-interesting, I wonder if we will find one.

Keys...and paint

The renters are gone and we have full access to our house. Now that the house is empty, we can see that the whole inside needs to be painted. Originally we were just going to paint the bedrooms.
Thanks to my brother-in-law we had some ideas for paint colors. He is so good with colors and sent us paint chips. We wanted to get most of it painted before we filled it with furniture. This lead to a painting frenzy. Within 5 days the bedrooms, office, hall, living area - large room that encompasses a living, dining rooms and a kitchen - were all painted. The previous owners had purple and blue walls, with dark blue carpet, in the smaller rooms and green walls in the living area. With that color scheme I felt like is was living in an Easter egg. So we put Kilz, a great primer, on first then the paint color that we wanted. I will have to post some before and after Picts. The only thing left to paint is the bathrooms, doors and trims, kitchen cabinets, and the closets. It was enough painting to get the furniture in the house. We also had the carpet cleaned, it's a newer carpet so we will be living with it for a while.
We bought a new washer and dryer and had them delivered and installed by 2 wonderful guys. Only they couldn't install it, they tried but the hot water valve broke off spraying the nice installer with piping hot water. I didn't see all of this. The only thing I saw, as I was painting by a window, was 3 guys- installers and Mr. UAW-running all over the yard looking for the water shut off valve. I said to myself, "that doesn't look good, just keep painting, just keep painting...." Water was finally shut off, installer dried off, garage floor moped up, Mr. UAW made trip to Home Depot, valve replaced, washer installed and I just kept painting. Appparently the previous owners had a less than ideal hot water valve set up. It's a wonder that it didn't break years ago.
While we were painting, our POD was delivered with most of our belongings in it. Getting the roll up door open was interesting frustrating. Everything had shifted towards the door, so the rollup part of the rollup door was compromised. They, the driver and Mr. UAW, could only get it up 18 inches. At that point they could take a few things out of the bottom creating enough space for a tall thin person to squeeze in and figure something out. I was elected so I wiggled my way in. With just enough room to stand, I could figure out the problem. A mattress and a chair were pressing on the roll up portion of the door, hence the door was stuck. I could not push everything back, but could pound on the mattress enabling the door to raise up 2 inches at a time. Then we got enough door open to remove some more boxes so we could remove the other problem-the chair. Now the door could open. Phew, back to painting.
It's great to be here in our own house. There will always be obstacles to overcome, building confidence, patience and providing some good stories. More to come as I need to be off unpacking my POD....

Taking some trips..."vacations"

Our house closed on May 12 and the seller is renting back from us for 3 weeks, so we have some time to take off. We made a decision to go to the ocean for a few days. Cape Lookout, tide pooling at Haystack Rock and Indian Beach, visiting Fort Stevens to see the shipwreck Peter Iredale, and see some of the decommissioned fort. Then we took a day trip to Silver Falls State Park. It's a beautiful place with many water falls, some that you can walk behind! I can't wait until I can update these posts with some pictures!
I was wondering if calling these excursions "vacations" was the correct term. Being newly retired, everything feels like a vacation. Maybe my grandson has the right idea by calling these trips adventures. Anyway, it was nice to escape the house purchasing process, and see some different areas of my adopted home state of Oregon.

A week with the grandkids

My daughter and son-in-law went on vacation to celebrate their 10th anniversary. The island of St. Lucia was their destination, found in the Caribbean, wonderfully warm but not too hot, slower pace of life and a place to relax for a week. In the meantime, Grandpa and I were in charge of the 5 year old kindergarten boy, Z, and the 2 year old (remember I said 2 years old) girl, M. While Mom and Dad were off on their adventure, as the grands called their parents trip, we had our own adventure with the grandkids.
We have been staying with them the whole time we've been here and we frequently visited before our move here so we all knew each other fairly well. While the grands missed their parents, they didn't have any qualms about us being in charge. We just had the normal 5 year old active boy and 2 year old girl issues to deal with but we were up for the challenge. I have to admit that age and time have caught up to me...it was easier to deal with 2 kids this age when I was younger however I do have the advantage of retirement on my side. My only "job" for the whole week was to deal with the children, we didn't have to go to a job outside the home, both Mr UAW and I could tag team all day long. The only hard part was when Mr UAW got a cold/fever for a few days. In that case I felt like I had 3 kids to take care of, but he was better for our adventures with the grands.
Our adventures turned out to be visiting the air/space museum one weekend. This was a big deal to our grandson. He was pretty excited. I think he liked the space side more than the airplane side. And a special note on the space side, we got to see some of the rocket engines that Mr UAW worked on when he was a tool designer at an aerospace company, and we got to see the space module that was picked up by a navy ship that Mr. UAW served on. On the airplane side, Z liked the B-17 bomber and the Spruce Goose.
The following weekend we spent the day at the ocean. We went to a lighthouse and Z got to climb up to the top with Grandpa. M and I stayed down as she was under the height limit to climb to the top. We went to the Tilamook Cheese Factory and of course you have to have ice cream there. And then it was off to the beach, where Z could run around like a wild 5 year old boy and M could experience waves licking her toes. Our trip to the beach was completed with an outing to a local fish and chips place. Needless to say, we had sleepy kids on the way home.
So we all more than survived our week. One of our final activities was to make a welcome home sign for Mom and Dad. We picked up the parents at the airport and enjoyed hearing about their trip.
This summer we have many adventures planned, some just Mr UAW and myself, some with just the family dog, some with one or both grandkids and some with the whole family. You'll have to check in to hear about the other ones.