Getting that privacy back

I think in my version of hell I'd be running a daycare out of my house and those commercials for Video Only ("You'll be sooooooorry!") would be playing on a loop overhead. I don't dislike children as much as I can't handle disruption in my home, and a bunch of kids are more destructive than bears. 

The house next door is finally on the market, which means I can start worrying about what our new neighbors will be like instead of worrying about garden damage and lead exposure.

This is our new solution to the flippers next door clearing every shrub from their property, giving them a clear view into our backyard. I'm not totally in love with it right now because it's a gigantic galvanized tub, right as walk into the yard, but I think as the grasses grow in I'll like it better.

Before:

And now:

Right now the area in front of the tank looks ridiculous.

Eryngium planum 'Blue Hobbit' and Sedum rupestre 'Lemon Ball'

Little blibs and blobs that will someday fill in and not look so silly.

There was a whole incident with the flippers hiring one of the kids from down the street to power wash the house, which deposited paint chips all over . . . then the wind picked up and blew them all into my yard. They cleaned them up but informed me they never did a lead test. They were totally unconcerned about it and one of their subcontractors informed me, "It's naturally occurring in the human body and it's not that harmful." Both of those things are false, especially for kids. Did I mention they had the eight year old from down the street picking paint chips out of my mulch? So irresponsible.

It's been stressful and I will be happy to never see them again. And hopefully I won't see the new owners . . . from the backyard, at least. Keep your fingers crossed that they want to plant a hedgerow between our houses. And that they're bakers or cheesemongers and that they don't have a garage band.

Agita in the garden

My elderly next-door neighbor recently went into assisted living and her grand-niece sold her home to some friends who want to start a business flipping homes. I'm very relieved that the home isn't going to fall into developer hands, which would result in the house being torn down and replaced with two or three skinny houses. This is happening all over Portland right now and I hope the developers responsible get shunted to the really humid part of hell. No dry heat for you!

This weekend the flippers, in their infinite wisdom, removed all but two of the mature (mostly native) shrubs in the back yard and limbed up the Doug fir. And because they decided to have some beers on the back deck afterward I realized that we no longer have any privacy between our two yards. This was my view:

Fun fact: if you google "jerkface" this weightlifter's mug pops up.

I was trying to work in the yard but the fact that I could see these guys and they could see me got me all worked up. I was practically hissing at them and I think I had a tiny stroke when one of the guys tried to engage me by yelling, "Hey, gardener!"

WHAT THE FUCK, I'M IN MY BACKYARD, WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE PRIVATE. I HATE YOU, I WISH YOU WOULD DIE.

Greg got home and I informed him that we needed to erect some sort of blind and also I wanted to move to the country so we wouldn't have to have neighbors. Back in the glory days, this was the view of this area:

My garden looks like shit but it's private!

Nice canopy cover, lots of mature shrubs perfectly obscuring that area. Those shrubs (one a flowering quince) weren't just trimmed this weekend, they were completely removed. So they won't grow back to obscure the area.

I went into burn it down! mode and decided that not only did we need a screen right there right now but we needed to make a point while we did it. So I headed out to Bamboo Craftsman and explained my problem. He steered me toward Green Temple bamboo (Semiarundinaria fastuosa 'Viridis'). This is a tall bamboo that is very erect, with most of the fullness at the top. You can read more here. It's excellent for tall, narrow screening. It fills in quickly and thickly.

The best part is that the plants I bought are already tall enough that they'll screen out that area immediately.

We've knocked out the little pony wall that used to have a gate attached to it. I liked having it there but Greg wanted to remove it to open up the entrance to the garden. I liked the slow reveal.

It's gone now. You win, Greg.

The plan is to install a stock tank here (it'll be ready for pickup on Wednesday) and soften the area in front with pots and grasses.

Behold my MS Paint skills!

Any advice on making this look not-dumb is welcome. I want my garden to say, "Welcome to my garden! Unless I haven't specifically invited you; then you can get the hell out!" I need my quiet space.

More to come once we get everything installed!

Good fences make angry neighbors

It was really hot this weekend, so rather than enjoy our deliciously cool house, we decided it would be a good time to put in the fence posts on the west side. There's nothing like digging really deep holes and struggling with bags of concrete when you're concerned about heat stroke.

We're bringing the fence forward just enough to hide the air conditioning unit from the street. We're also going to install a gate so we can enter and exit through either side of the yard.

We found the buried property line pin at the sidewalk and ran a line back to the fence post in the very back of our yard. There was a lot of measuring and remeasuring and debating about how to deal with the fact that our existing fence practically meanders, it's so crooked.

You know how there's always telling you, "Call before you dig!"? If you call as a normal civilian they will mark where your lines are in your hell strip but they won't tell you where they are on the main part of your property, which is pretty useless. We know our gas line runs somewhere through this area, just not exactly where.

We got two post hole diggers from the Tool Library because we're only digging six holes. Also, I'm scared of puncturing our gas main with an auger. It really wasn't bad at all; it took us about an hour and a half to dig five of them. And I found our gas line! Thank goodness I was working on pulling out small rocks but hand when I did, so I didn't puncture it.

THANK YOU, UNIVERSE. Not blowing up is the best!

I don't have any progress photos but we dug our holes 24" down, put in six inches of dry quickcrete, then filled the rest of the cavity with wet quickcrete. It's what the bag said to do and I always listen to bags. We got everything all level but some of them settled so they're a little bit off. Have I mentioned that Greg is an engineer? These little booboos didn't bother him at all.

Just kidding, I thought he was going to have a stroke. Those little errors reallllly bother him.

I was like, look, our fence meanders anyway, and there's a huge cedar tree in the middle of it. Let's drink a beer and not think about it! This is why I'm not an engineer and why I'll never design bridges or spaceships or heart valves.

We ran out of concrete when we had one post to go, so we took a little break. At this point our next-door neighbor came by and he seemed . . . concerned. I had talked to him last summer about the fence and he was like, "Whatever! Do whatever you want, I don't care!" We stopped by that morning to talk to him but he was out. I figured he didn't care, which was not very neighborly of me. I wish I had waited long enough to talk to him again because I feel terrible now.

We have some hard decisions to make now, like whether to bring banana bread or pie when we go back to apologize again for not talking to him first, again.

What's the etiquette on this?

Is it ever okay to knock on the door of a house you found on a walk to
ask them if you can take pictures of their yard and pump them for
information on what plants they used?

This yard was lovely, with dense plantings separated by a large swath of lawn that made it look deceptively simple and uncluttered.

I think it's the perfect combination of mass platings that I love and the clean, uncluttered look that Greg prefers in a front yard. What are the chances they designed it themselves?

A quick update on the tree situation

My neighbor from around the corner called me today and told me that my next door neighbor E (the 83 year old with the doug fir in her yard) received the letter and flowers I left her . . .

. . . but she doesn't believe that I was not the one who reported the douglas fir to the city.

Photo yanked from here.

We are going to have a sit-down, just the three of us, sometime this week to clear the air. I wish E would just sit down with me, since this third neighbor has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I'll take what I can get. In the meantime I called the city forester to find out if they can really require someone to remove a healthy tree from their backyard. The woman I spoke with declared herself "a bleeding heart arborist" (Portland, I LOVE YOU) and said she'd look into the veracity of any complaints on the property.


Y'all keep your fingers crossed that I can convince E that I have logged no complaints to the city, nor do I have any complaints about her or her yard, forever and ever amen.

I feel sick

Remember the other day when I said I loved the trees in my neighbor's yard? I came home two days later to find that she had paid someone to cut the trees branches along our property line. I thought that was strange and made a mental note to tell her that we love the way her douglas fir pokes into our yard and she doesn't need to worry about that kind of thing with us.

I came home from work yesterday and Greg had put down sod where the dog bone had been! I was so happy! Everything was good.

Then everything was bad.

Greg went out in the front yard, called for me, then introduced me to a neighbor from around the corner. She was helping my next-door neighbor, who didn't want to talk to me because we had served her with papers demanding she cut down her doug fir.

Wait, what?

I'm not clear on all the details but my neighbor, who is in her seventies, had been served with papers stating that the tree is a nuisance (I'm guessing here, I haven't seen the papers) and it needs to be removed. She assumed that it was us, I guess because I had asked a while back what kind of tree it was. I'm devastated that someone is coming after her like that and that she could possibly think it was us. She has been a warm, patient, and wonderful neighbor. She's been awesome about how generally shitty my front yard looks all the time, and how neglectful I've been of the roses. I adore her.

I also adore the tree. It is healthy and beautiful and it's all on her property (with the exception of a few branches that poke into our yard THAT WE LIKE). We have a number of much larger, older trees in the neighborhood, on our block even, so I'm not sure why hers is a problem. I left a letter for my neighbor last night, along with some flowers. I explained that we didn't report her, that we love the tree, and that we'll fight to keep the tree for her, should she lack the energy. I'm hoping she'll believe me and that she'll let me see the papers from the city (or county?) so we can see why this is happening.

Anybody have any ideas for plans of action? I contacted a friend who works for the city to see if they can dig into who reported her, or why. I'm going to contact the mayor's office and the city forester. I could nominate it as a Heritage Tree, but she may have it removed before August 31, when they process nominations.

I'm also concerned that someone will report our hemlock (or whatever that huge tree in my yard is) or any of the FOUR trees we are planning on adding to our backyard. I'll never understand why people don't just talk to each other, instead of calling in the city, or law enforcement, or lawyers. They're going to have to use a crane to remove the tree and I'd guess (based on people I know who have done this) that it will cost her $3000-5000 to have it removed. Did I mention she's in her eighties? I'm sure her social security check will cover that.

Did I also mention her deceased husband planted the tree? It was a gift from the forest service, for whom he worked as a writer. It was a six inch seedling when they planted it. There is so much suckage in this I can hardly comprehend it.

A borrowed view

The entrance into the side yard is so much prettier because of my neighbor's trees. I love borrowed landscaping.

 

Just ignore the trashcans.

Fence is gone!

Well, for better or worse, we did it.

I can't stress enough how great both sets of neighbors have been throughout this process. It's makes the whole ordeal just a tiny bit less stressful.  Now we just have to wait eleven (!) days for the posts to be put in.

If good fences make for good neighbors, I am the worst.

So the fence situation hasn't gotten any better.  The part that I propped up will not stay that way, so I finally just removed it to another corner of the yard.  I've been hunting for fence designs on Flickr and, man, people are building some really lovely fences these days.

But back to reality.  I finally met with the neighbor behind me to talk about the fence.  He's really very nice but I got the sense that he felt like the fence wasn't his. 

I spent way more time than I really wanted researching Oregon boundary fence laws and turned up this state statute that explains that responsibility is 50/50.  I wrote a letter explaining everything I was proposing and included a copy of the statute and the city's recommendation for building.  I really didn't know how they would receive it so I tried to temper the formality by including a bit at the end about how I feel very warmly toward them and I really want to keep everything friendly.

And you know what? I got a super nice email that night in response. Huzzah!  He even thinks he might prefer a horizontal board fence.  DOUBLE HUZZAH.

So right now we're planning for May and then I can start focusing on camouflaging the fence on the west side where there's so little privacy it might as well be a window.  I have a litmus test for how private I'd like the yard to be but I won't write it here since my mother is reading this.

Okay, it's gardening with the short shorts.  Nobody wants to see that.

The backyard fence

No joke, the day the house passed into my ownership a huge wind swept through the valley and knocked down a portion of my fence. It's like the universe wanted to welcome me to homeownership by crushing my spirits and taking all my money right away.

The neighbors put the fallen section in my yard. I met one of them this summer and I asked her if she knew who owned the fence, and was it a shared burden?

"Oh, we think the fence is yours!" she replied. Of course you do!

Ryan helped me jury rig the fence one morning using some rope. It looks classy, I know!

The posts (which are sunk in the neighbors' yard) weren't sunk into concrete.  The wood is rotting and the whole operation is ready to fall into their yard at any minute.

 

 I checked out a bunch of books on Oregon neighbor and property laws and promptly put them in a pile somewhere and forgot about them. I called the city and asked if they could just tell me if the fence was mine.  I was told I have to hire a surveyor who would figure out the property lines.  I need to spend some money just to (most likely) have someone tell me that the fence is mine.  I'm not thrilled.

Luckily it's wet and cold out and I don't think cement would dry in this weather, so I'm hoping I can hold off on a new fence until spring.  Last night was especially windy and I was convinced the whole fence was going to blow down.  Luckily, just that one part fell down again.  That, folks, is what they call the silver lining.

That looks sturdy, right?  Portland wind, KNOCK IT OFF.