Joe and Lynda
bought a House!!

As many of you know, we started house hunting in the late fall of 2001.  We knew we wanted a place of our own -- somewhere where we could have a garden and a few more rooms, live in a nice neighbourhood and settle.  We were bursting at the seams in our apartment and really wanted to have a room for a guest (or guests) and a different room for the computer.  It was definitely quite cramped in the 1024 sq ft apartment -- mostly because the floorplan was laid out badly.  Anyway, we plunged into the world of real estate.

Wow.  There's a steep learning curve when you start looking for a house.  Here in Texas, there's a lot of space, so houses tend to be quite a bit bigger.  We knew that we were planning to be just the two of us (and the bears) so we didn't need a lot of rooms, but at first we thought it would be nice to have a two story house.  We quickly gave that idea up as most houses with two stories were much too big for us.  We thought that around 1800 - 2400 sq ft would suit us fine -- surely that would be enough!  We found ourselves a realtor to help us find the right place, figured out our price range and made our list of what we wanted.  Three bedrooms, perhaps a dining room.  Joe wanted a deck, if possible and Lynda wanted a library/study -- somewhere for all our books.  She quickly found out that there are a lot of houses out there.  A lot.  She started using a checklist and taking the digital camera whenever she went out with the realtor.  We looked online at HAR.com, we looked at houses while driving around in neighbourhoods we liked.  We looked and looked and finally we found this place.

On a corner lot, in a friendly subdivision we found our little (by Texas standards -- 1860 sq ft) gray brick 3 bed, 2 bath home with a fireplace, gas stove, breakfast nook, dining room (the window on the left of the front door), library (the window on the right of the front door in the picture), deck, garden and even a little 15 foot above ground pool.  We took posession on December 27 (yes, we packed during Christmas -- remind me to never do that again!) and went right over to look at our new home.  We learned quickly that the previous owners (C&R) had smoked more than we'd thought and that the living room would need to be painted.  So we made plans for the New Year's Even weekend -- Painting!  Moving day was set for January 5 so we wanted to get a lot done.  Lynda and Joe learned a lot that first weekend but it was so rewarding to have the living room freshly painted -- by us!  There's a lot of wallpaper in the house which Lynda plans to remove, but one thing at a time.

Lynda had been in the house the day before the move, waiting for the delivery of our new queen bed and kitchen table and cleaning the place up.  C&R didn't do that much cleaning before Lynda and Joe took possession so there was work to do to keep busy while waiting.  And, since the bed had arrived before the move, it was easy to make sure that it was made for us at the end of moving day.  You always want to have the bed done first otherwise you're just too tired!  All our friends helped us with the move, as we had helped them in turn.  It was a very rainy Saturday (as Joe said in our Christmas letter for 2002 -- one move in four years and it monsoons???!).  After feeding our movers pizza and beer (standard moving fare), we headed back to the apartment to clean up there -- we knew that once we started unpacking, we wouldn't want to go back there to clean.

Then the actual moving in began.  We started unpacking boxes, and hanging picures and removing anchors.  One thing about C&R -- they put anchors in the walls for everything!  Which isn't so bad for painted rooms (and we got them all when we repainted the living room) but hard to hide in wallpapered rooms.  We were constantly amazed at the variety and volume of nails, screws, hooks and anchors we found in the walls, exceeded only by the holes (sometimes R just couldn't get the right spot, so made several holes before deciding on the best one!).  We even kept a few of the vast variety which you can see here.

Slowly but surely it started to take shape and we started to feel at home and that we were making it our own.  Luckily we moved in in the middle of winter as we had much to do without throwing the garden and lawn into the mix!  That came soon enough.  With a 10 month growing season, we soon found ourselves busy with that too.  Joe found a mower (after trying to do it with a push mower and finding it waaay too much work, and it was only February!

Lynda's first big project was changing the guest bathroom (you can see the details on the Projects page).  Lynda had to get the job done on a deadline as we were gettting ready to have the housewarming party when Rose was there for a visit. Unfortunately no pictures exist of the party since we were all too busy eating and socializing to actually remember the camera.  I could have kicked myself when I thought of it after everyone had gone home, but then it was too late.  We had a great time though and Rose was a huge help with the cooking (gotta have a spread, dontcha know!) and it was especially nice to have someone from home here to meet all our new Houston friends and enjoy our housewarming.After the hoopla of the housewarming, we settled into summertime mode and started lamenting the amount of time it takes to keep a garden and grass growing and growing well.  Let me tell you about it!!

Garden & Grass

Joe quickly discovered (as mentioned above), that mowing a lawn with a push mower wasn't really an option for us.  He'd borrowed it from a friend of his here, but this guy is a triathelete!  He runs marathons in the Houston summer weather!  He's not mortal!  Joe is.  Mortal.  So he went out to Home Depot / Lowes (these home stores are loving us!  We needed everything!) and found himself a power mower. And a trimmer.  If I may quote from the Christmas letter:

               "...with a 6.5 HP self-propelled mulching mower with convertible rear/side bag and a multi-attachment
               trimmer/edger/blower. Their names are Troy and John (Troy-Bilt and John Deere, of course)."

Good thing too since the grass here grows at a phenomenal rate!  You can see from the picture below, how high it can grow in just two weeks.  Last summer when we went on our 'Vegas Baby!' vacation the grass went unmowed for the two weeks we were gone and was completely out of control when we returned -- mowing it was the first thing Joe did, while I unpacked the car!

The grass that grows in Houston is called St. Augustine grass.  This stuff is mutant -- I'm not kidding.  You know that wonderful feeling you had in the summer, walking barefoot on the cool, soft grass?  Never happens here.  The grass is thick and vine-y and loves to grow over concrete.  Joe is convinced that he could get the grass to grow anywhere if only he paved it first.  I think anywhere else it would be considered crabgrass!  It's also not winter hardy so in the winter it developes a yellow undertone and doesn't require mowing (remember winter here is from about January to early March).  It can be a bit difficult to maintain -- there are bugs and weeds that like the same areas and will kill it.  Oh!  You can't grow it from seed!  You have to buy turf or plugs and grow it this way.  Joe had to put in plugs on the
side of the house this spring where last year we had a bad chinch bug infestation.  I don't remember my parents having to much other than water and mow our lawn in Vancouver, but here you need to weed & feed it and treat it ever so nicely.  More work!

The garden is also keeping us busy.  I had no idea we were so talented at growing weeds until we moved into a house!   Now, part of the appeal of this house was the lovely garden with roses and other plants (like we know what they are!) ~ but we quickly discovered that it takes a lot of work to keep the weeds and grass at bay.  As stated above, the grass loves to grow where it's not wanted -- like in my flowerbeds!  Out, out damn crabgrass!  It tends to creep under the fence from the neighbour's yards and from the side of the house.  So I wage a constant battle against grass, chickweed, some stringy green-onion-like weed (I wish I could identify it -- might help me fight it) and other weeds.  We seem to have quite a variety of them here too.  The dandilions (every gardener's favorite) seem especially nasty here as they are prickly!  Ouch!

The work is worth it when the roses bloom though.
 

In the summer of 2004 Lynda and Joe finally made the connection between lack of weeds and mulch covering the flower beds.  Lynda worked very, very hard in the spring and early summer to weed out completely the nutsedge that had invaded her flower beds.  Nutsedge is an evil weed that looks a bit like grass on the surface but under the soil it creates a nut from which many runners can spring.  It's very difficult to dig it out as the roots are very thin and break away from the nut easily.  If you don't remove the nut, the stuff will just grow back.  But the other weeds inhabiting our flowerbeds were the kind that blow in and land on the soil and start sprouting.  So Lynda weeded out the flower beds and Joe improved the soil by mixing in some peat moss and sand and topsoil.  The native 'soil' here is clay.  Slippery gooey clay.  Very hard to weed when dried out -- it's like brick.  Once Joe mixed in the peat, sand and soil, we covered it all with a thick layer of mulch.  Wow!  What a difference.

In June of 2005 we decided that the work of gardening was too much for us.  We succumbed to the lure of a gardener, especially since our next-door neighbour had found a wonderful guy, Filipe, to do his place.  We talked to Felipe and he agreed to do our place too.  Now he and his crew do all the mowing, weeding, and edging, of the lawn and they also trim all the bushes and trees, plant colour for us twice a year, spread mulch and weed in the garden, and take care of all things gardening related for us and do a great job.  Joe's work has been keeping him busier and it just seemed to be time to admit that with the heat and Joe's allergies it was too much for us.  Lynda was happy to concentrate on projects inside the house and leave the sweating over weeds to someone else!
 

Pool

Okay, the pool...  Now we never thought we'd have a pool.  We actually didn't want one.  Too much work and all that.  But when we found this house there was so much to like about it -- the deck, the garden, the library, all the good stuff...  So we decided to take it in spite of the pool.  It's a 15-foot above ground pool -- not much to look at but it holds water.  We weren't even sure we'd keep it.  We could just take it down and let the grass fill in the spot where it was....  But we decided to give it a go.  So we got it all ready for the spring, and kept testing the water to make sure we'd got it right -- not to alkaline, not too chlorine-y.  Wharehouse Pool Supply was getting sick of seeing one or the other of us toting a water bottle and asking for an analysis.  But as long as we kept buying our chemicals there, there
wasn't too much to complain about

As with everything in the house, the first year was a learning experience.  Joe learned that he had to vacuum it every other day or so to make sure that it didn't go green.  There's nothing like telling your co-workers that you can't swim in the pool because it's green -- yucch.  But -- when we had it right, it was great.  Joe used it as a reward for all his hard work mowing the lawn.  You've gotta have a reward if you're going to sweat in the 90+º heat and 90+% humidity at 8 in the morning!

So the pool, while being yet another thing to maintain, is a reward.  Joe loves telling people after a hard Friday at work, he's going home and getting in the pool.  Or after mowing the lawn and whatever else outdoor chores he did on the weekend, he got into his pool.  Pretty nice.  Also a big hit at the housewarming party.

At the end of 2004 we re-evaluated the pool experience.  After the liner fell in and drained the pool yet again and knowing that we'd only used it a couple of times in the last year, we decided that in the spring of 2005 we'd take out the pool and sod over the area with grass.  It's quite a lot of work and the pool itself does not have a very sturdy frame, so we'll hold onto the filter in case we decide to get a better pool but for now, we'll be fine without it.Joe took down the pool in the winter (or what passes for winter here!) and Lynda asked him to dispose of it before her friend Rose came to visit.  For a long time we had a patch of sand in the middle of the backyard, but Joe tackled this too and by April we had grass taking hold and growing over the space where the pool had been.  In the spring of 2006 we'll plant some flowers under the Rose of Sharon trees back there and it'll look great.
 

Birdies:

We installed a Purple Martin house in the backyard in May 2004.  We had noticed that some neighbours
had taken theirs down when they moved so there was a need for a replacement house in the area.  It was actually very late in the season to put it up, but we thought we'd give it a try.  Some Purple Martins did find our house but they were too late to lay fertile eggs.  The eggs they laid never hatched so I took the nest to the NAM Children's Clinic where I volunteer so the kids could see it.  I hope they'll be back next year when we'll be sure to put up the house early -- at the end of January this time.

We couldn't leave the house up year round because of the Sparrows.  We found that we had to be ever vigilant or sparrows would come in and use the house for their own nests -- shoving in more stuff than you would think the cubbyhole could hold and pushing out the Purple Martins.  Since Sparrows can nest anywhere, we didn't have much problem turfing them out and removing their nests.  But we had to check the house a couple of times a week and remove any Sparrow nests we found.  Purple Martins rely on the houses people provide since there are few old woodpecker holes for them to use after trees are taken down to make room for more subdivisions...
 
 

More Household renovations...

Lynda has been working very hard on updating the decor of many of the rooms and areas in the house.  There are still some projects to tackle, but starting in the spring of 2003, the entry, laundry room, computer room, hallway, guest bedroom, kitchen and breakfast area have been done.  It's quite amazing.  Especially the kitchen.  Lynda and Joe wondered how they lived with it for so long once they saw how good it could be!  There's been so much work done that she's had to write 2 whole new pages on the changes she's made.  Look for the link at the bottom of the page as: House Projects.
 

January 2006: The Homeowner's Association

In June on 2005 we finally decided that we just aren't gardeners, and with Joe's allergies, he was having so much trouble keeping up with the mowing.  So we finally got a gardening team to do it all for us.  They weed (YAY!!! -- Lynda) and trim the bushes and twice a year they put in colour for us and add mulch and do all the stuff that we are so inept at doing.  It's wonderful and worth every penny we pay them even though it's a little extra because we are on a corner.  Filipe even sewed some Rye grass this winter so we have a green lawn all winter long.  They feed the lawn and keep up with the weeds and do it all for us.  The oleander which is under the office window now looks full and lush and when we took care of it, it always looked rangy and gangly.  It's so much better.  This is our property on Feb. 18, 2005, before Felipe's scheduled visit:
 
 

You can see that our bushes are trimmed and we even have pansies and snapdragons under our pine tree.  We had, however, noticed that some of our neighbours had been losing the winter battle of the weeds.  In fact the incidence of weeds in all shapes and sizes is quite extensive -- dollar weed being very prominent, but also many of the monster weeds we see around Houston.  So you can imagine our surprise and shock to receive a letter from our homeowner's association, dated Feb. 15, asking us to cut, weed and edge our lawn when this is what many of our neighbours' lawns look like:
 
 

But what really got us mad was the condition of the median that runs down the main street in our subdivision.  This is property that the homeowner's association is supposed to care for.  I would expect that they must have it in good shape before calling on us to take care of our lawn, mustn't they?  See for yourself.

We can only hope that they just sent out the letters to everyone in the subdivision, or that they are unable to read street signs.
 
 
 

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Last Updated:2006-02-19