This is Your Brain on Drugs....

....and this is my floor on acid!

I feel like a little back story might be in order.

So I mentioned here and here that we were planning on (and in the midst of) converting our garage into liveable space that could be used as my music room. Well it's ALMOST done! You can see above that the walls have been painted (though there is some touch up work to do since the baseboards have been installed), the door installed, and baseboard added. What you can't see is the HVAC vent that has been added, the painted ceilings, the closet, and added electrical outlets.

Rather than adding the expense of putting flooring over the concrete, I decided to just paint the floor. At the beginning of this project, this looked like a no brainer. You just roll out the paint on the floor like you do on the walls right?

WRONG.

When I went to actually buy the floor paint, I was informed that because most garage floors are sealed (it's what keeps every drip and drop that comes out of our cars from leaving big ugly stains), I would have to etch the concrete in order to open the pores and get the paint to stick.

So how does one etch a concrete floor? With muriatic acid. Yes, I said acid.

The nice man at Home Depot was nice enough to walk me through the process, but when it came time to actually do this, I have to admit I was pretty intimidated. Acid eats through clothing, skin. It is harmful if inhaled....and besides the possibility of bodily harm, what if it got on something it shouldn't? And muriatic acid (which I have since been informed is a variety of sulphuric acid) is the sizzle and pop kind.

So the process goes like this:

1. Don long sleeves, long pants, shoes you don't care about, and rubber gloves. 
2. Open all the windows and doors so you have good ventilation. 
3. In a watering can, you combine 3 parts water to 1 part acid. I recommend doing this outside so the fumes aren't in your house.
4. This solution gets sprinkled on a section of the concrete (whilst being very careful not to get any of it on your clothes, shoes, skin, etc. Safety first). It will sizzle like an egg in a hot frying pan. It's scary. Just keep going.
5. Push the acid solution around with a broom to make sure you get full coverage.
6. Wait a few minutes.
7. With a mop and a bucket full of plain water, mop up the acid. You will get all kinds of nastiness off your floor that you never knew was there. I had to change the water frequently.
8. Repeat (still working in sections) until you have etched the entire floor.
9. Once the floor is dry, mop with plain water again.

All total (not including drying time), this took me about two hours for a room the size of a one car garage. I barely finished the acid part in time to get ready for school, and did the final mopping when I got home. I still have to prime the floor and then paint it. I'll keep you posted!

Has anyone else ever etched concrete? Was it as scary for you as it was for me?

A Little Bug Control

Well I've learned something new....and there's a bit of back story here.

We have six giant hackberry trees on our lot, one of which hangs directly over our driveway. We had been told somewhere along the way that hackberries spit sap, which eats at the paint on your car (and we spend last summer with our cars covered in black sticky stuff), so we had thought we were going to need to cut the one by our driveway down. At the same time, we also thought that we were going to have to take two of them in the backyard down as well because they are very close to the house.

Now, I did get a quote to have all three trees removed.....and nearly had heart failure. It was going to cost us $5600(!!!) to get those trees taken down!!

This was the point where I started looking for alternatives, and someone suggested I speak with an arborist to find out whether the trees even needed to come down, or whether they could be trimmed back, and checked for general health. With this idea in my head, I started looking for arborists, and found Quality Tree here in Nashville (I'm not affiliated with them....in fact, they don't even know I'm writing about them!).

The arborist came and checked out the trees (I didn't even have to be there), and called me back with the prognosis: none....that's right, none....of the trees actually needed to come down.

What he did tell me was that all of the hackberries had been topped at some point. I don't fully understand why someone would lop off the top third of a tree, but I do know that it damages the trees. The arborist told me that one of the trees had developed a form of root rot, but that it wasn't nearly advanced enough to worry about removing the tree. He did, however, recommend that both trees up close to the house be trimmed to remove anything hanging over the house, any dead wood, and extra, unnecessary brush. Easy enough, and this process is far less expensive than removing even one tree.

As for what I learned, the tree over the driveway also didn't need to come down. Hackberries are extremely susceptible to aphid infestations. The black sap that was getting all over our cars is actually not sap. It's an aphid secretion called honeydew.

Nothing like having sticky aphid poo all over your car right?

Fortunately, the aphid problem has an easy fix: Merit. The arborist said he could do this for me, but that it would be less expensive for me to do it myself, and that it's a pretty easy process. All I had to do is get this merit stuff, mix it according to the directions, and pour it around the base of the tree. The tree soaks up the insecticide and the aphids die. The only thing I really needed to know is that this has to be done during March, well before the aphids start their summer-long party on my tree.

So off I went looking for this merit stuff. Home Depot didn't have it, but Bates Nursery did! I grabbed a bottle and headed home ready to kill me some aphids.

The directions were a little confusing at first, but I finally figured out that I needed to measure the circumference of my tree (easier said than done since my arms can't reach all the way around the tree!). Then, I needed to mix 1 ounce per inch of circumference with 1 gallon of water. Since My tree is (much) larger than 16 inches in circumference, I needed two gallons of this mixture.

Since my tree is 60 inches in circumference, I quickly realized I was going to need much more than the 32 oz. that I bought, so back to Bates I went for the gallon size. There are other brands, but this is the solution that I purchased:

I got out my 5 gallon bucket and got to mixing. The merit is a milky white substance.....

And it's actually not chunky....my bucket just had a little leaf debris from my fall cleanup.

I measured out 120 oz, mixed it with 2 gallons of water and poured it around the tree, covering two feed out from the base. Easy as pie. Oh, and this treatment should last a full year!

So has anyone else been killing some aphids? Tree trimming?

A New Light Fixture for the Dining Room

First of all, Happy New Year everyone! Here's hoping everyone had safe and happy holidays. I have to admit, I didn't even stay up last night.....probably something to do with my date being on the other side of the globe....

Anyway, I went to SC to be with my family at Christmas and stopped in Atlanta to see my brother in law. Kind and patient soul that he is, he actually walked through IKEA with me, and I came home with this.

Now, my husband and I installed the light fixture in our bathroom, but I had never done this by myself....safety in numbers I suppose. Anyhow, since the hubs is off defending the country, I thought I'd give this a go on my own.

To give you an idea of what I was replacing, here is the "boob light" that was there when we moved in.

Just a basic ceiling fixture....but I wanted something with a little more pizazz to go over the dining table. I've actually been looking for months and despairing at how much it was going to cost me to purchase a cool light (everything I saw that I actually liked was over $100....some I saw were upwards of $400!!). While I was home for Christmas, my sister and I were pouring over the IKEA catalog app on my iPad and low and behold, was the Maskros light for a mere $39.99. I almost danced with joy.

Once I made it back home to Nashville, I asked some friends if I could borrow their ladder and got down to it. Like I mentioned before, my husband and I had changed a light fixture before, so I knew it wasn't hard.

First, let me stress safety.....I made sure the power to the fixture was off. Since my breaker box is not labeled well, that meant shutting off the power to the entire house. Better safe than sorry right?

I got the boob light detached from the ceiling. At first glance, there wasn't really anything unusual. This is what it looked like...

Now, to give you some orientation, this is a two bulb fixture, with a white and a black wire coming from each bulb. Those four are consolidated to one white and one black wire, which is what is actually wired to the ceiling. The only weird thing is that instead of grounding the fixture, whoever installed this took the grounding wire (the copper one coming from the middle of the fixture) and just wrapped it around the white and black wires. Weird.

And speaking of weird, when I looked up into the wire box, here's what I saw.

It's kinda hard to make out (keep in mind I was balancing on a ladder while doing this), but there is a second set of black and white wires in the wire box that have been capped. Being the careful girl that I am (and really, REALLY not wanting to burn down the house), I called my dad. He told me those extra wires were probably from a second light switch that probably used to be in the room, that was somewhere along the way removed. Seems plausible to me, and meant that I really just had to leave those extra wires right where they were, so I got the old fixture un-wired, and the new one wired in, simply matching white with white and black with black, then attaching the ground wire to the screw-to-nowhere in the wire box. Screw that puppy into the ceiling, turn the power back on, give myself a high five and then all I had to do was attach the million and two wire thingys that stick out from the center.

That was about halfway through (boy do I need to get a tripod for my camera...sorry about the blurriness!).  Once I got the rest of the wire things attached, then it was time for the billion and two paper star-flower-thingies. Those just snap on to the ends of the wires. It's not hard, but there are a TON of them! Anyway, here's the finished product.

 

Pretty cool right? I'll try to get some better pictures after I get my dining room put together so you can see the full effect, but I love how it makes cool patterns on the ceiling!

Remaking Our Firepit

I mentioned before that our firepit was a bit of a safety hazard when we moved in. The previous owner had basically piled random rocks and brick pieces in a (very large) circle and called it good. If you so much as bumped the rock border, said border went rolling away....not so great when they are heated from a fire. Here is a refresher on what it looked like.

Looks a little precarious right? Well, the hubs and I decided to fix that. Using a wheelbarrow we borrowed from some friends (thanks Pat and Jessica!), Jacob hauled off all those rocks and pieces of brick.

After that was done, off we went to Home Depot to find circular pavers. What we came up with was the pavers that are used to build retaining walls. At just under $2 per paver, we needed 16 pavers, so the total cost of this was about $30 (a small price to pay for the added safety and aesthetic appeal!). The really awesome thing: some of our wonderful friends gave us Home Depot gift cards as housewarming gifts...hooray! and thanks!!!)

After our little foray to Home Depot, my lovely (and studly) husband carted all the pavers to the firepit area while I started digging into the ash and sand that was already there to make a level and correctly sized ring for us to place the pavers. Turned out it works better to level enough space for one paver, place the paver and repeat until you have a full circle. Fortunately, it didn't take me long to figure this out.

Once we had a full ring of pavers, we created a second layer, just placing another ring of them on top of the ones that were already there...and without further ado, here is our new firepit!

Definitely need to do something with that dirt patch to make it look at little neater. I suspect the bermuda grass will take care of it for me though! 

I should mention that we have not gotten to use this puppy yet. The weekend we made it, it was 109, 105 and then 106 degrees, and Nashville was under a burn ban. That burn ban lasted for another week and it's been raining ever since (and good thing too, since it didn't rain for over a month here!). *sigh* Hopefully we'll get to use it soon!

Introducing.....a Blank Slate (Part I)

Whew! We are all moved in, and though we are still unpacking, I thought I'd share my blank slate of a yard with you all. I'm going to split this post into two in the interest of not writing the longest blog post EVER, so without further ado, I present to you my front yard.

First (and yes, I know this isn't technically the front yard), here's what our garage looks like....well....kind of. Right now, we'll call it Mt. Box ok?

Before you get too scared, here is a wider shot....no....we did not have boxes piled five feet high through our entire garage (just part of it).

Actually, at the bottom of that picture, you can see my first little indoor project happening (shelf painting!), but we'll talk more about that later.

Here's the front of the house from the end of the driveway. Not terribly exciting (yet), but we're getting there. The gigantic hackberry tree next to the driveway is going to come down probably this winter. Hackberries spit a sap that ruins the paint on cars, so one hanging over the driveway is really not ideal, especially since the garage is not going to stay a garage.

Not really sure what these little trees/bushes are off to the left of the driveway, but I am going to have to trim them back so they don't invade the driveway as well as getting the vines off of them.

Now this, I am pretty excited about. We have a lovely hibiscus bush in the front yard. You can see the end of the pretty purple blooms (it was covered in them a few weeks earlier).

There is all kinds of ivy growing up the trees in the front and back yards. We actually tackled getting it all off of the trees last weekend. The vines look great, but they bore into the trees and can kill them.

You can actually see the little tendrils the vines send out to attach themselves to the tree. No good!!

Moving on....I now present you with the ugliest lollipop ever.....

This guy has already been removed as well (I'll get some after pictures soon!). There are/were a couple problems with this: it blocks one entire window in the living room (not cool), it was growing up into the power line to the house (really not cool), and since it is so big and rotund, it also blocks the view of the path to the front door from the driveway (REALLY not cool, and a safety hazard, especially for when the hubs deploys again).

To the side of the front door, there is this wonderfully fragrant gardenia....

....and a not-so-wonderfully scraggly rose bush.....

....and that's it for what's in front of the house. Fortunately, my wonderful voice teacher and his wife have been saving some bushes they dug out of their front yard for us, so we will hopefully have something to put here soon!

Lastly, here is my awesome red front door! The porch needs to be power washed and repainted, but we've all got to start somewhere, right?

Whew! Hopefully I didn't totally bore you with all that. I am making my to-do list as I go along. What have you guys been up to? Did everyone have a great 4th?