Kimbrel-Slaves Toil in Houston Humidity

A month or so back I was watching a documentary on the Pyramids, one of those History channel weekend time-suck shows that just make your eyes glaze over. My eyes were already glazed over thinking about the many home improvement projects we'd planned for the new house. The monumental tasks were: to ready the nursery for the new baby and Wynne, to build a fence gate where the old one had rotted and fallen off its hinges; repair broken and/or missing pickets in the backyard, and to beautify the backyard before the summer heat makes it hellish to even try.

We call this "gate fail":

The room on the right is the nursery; white walls and beige carpet and it is devoid of personality.


You can see here the fence line and garage and there's about half a planting bed, a frail looking tree and a pepper plant and that's it.  


It wasn't long before I had one of those epiphanies where you hear an angelic chorus in your head. How did the Egyptians get those pyramids built? Slaves! We could apply the same solution here....flash forward several weeks later, and the Kimbrels landed at the airport for a 5 day visit. The work could begin. Scott is uniquely qualified for home improvement work given his mind for design and yearning for destruction. Not to mention we got to see super-cute Alexandra, who is the same age as Wynne and made a perfect playmate for her.  Best of all they were perfectly willing to be put to work.

After 4 days of backbreaking labor that we could never have pulled off without the Kimbrels, we pulled off the projects. Erin and Melissa tackled the nursery and painted like a couple of pregnant renaissance masters. And Scott and I toiled in the Houston humidity.

We had to hang the new gate from the garage since the perpendicular section of fence was so warped and off kilter.  It's comically new looking next to the old fence section.

The new pickets give the yard that striped look.  Should be good at least until hurricane season, and now you can't just stroll into our yard!

Over the next three days we moved on to the yard improvements.  Two sides of the yard got
roto-tilled planting beds dug (you can see that above pre-planting); a third side had an existing planting bed of elephant ears and fern.   Scott and I laid out a plan for bushes and flowers to add some color.  We dug up the old tree and pepper plant, then inserted grass stops all along the three areas.  The next day I made four trips back and forth to a local garden center and bought the plants we'd need.  There are Mandevilla climbing vines on white trellisses; maui red ixea and golden eunonymus bushes, and lots of japanese boxwood. These bigger, heartier plants formed the back row.  Lillies of the valley and flowering grasses formed a second row on a diagonal to the 1st row.  Finally small flowers and colored grasses  such as the boat lilly formed a front row border.  

It took a long time just to dig our way through the mud-like black Houston soil.  The stuff is like thick potting soil but in chunks.  The most interesting part was discovering an entire layer about 6 inches down of seashells; we speculate that this area was a beach at some point!  We also found green pottery shards as well in different places.   

The shot below is a panoramic.

Meanwhile, Erin picked out a vertical striped pattern of differing shades of teal for the nursery; teal will make a nice gender neutral color and gives the room lots of personality.  Randi made crib sheets, changing pads and blankets to match these colors as well.

Wynne and Alex helped us too - they made sure the pool water was nice. 

It was really a fun and productive weekend!