Washing the Windows

Linda said that the windows were looking dirty, and since I had been thinking the same, it seemed like a good time to clean them.

At least some of the issue seemed to be with the screens.  I think that the dirt in the air first goes thru the screens and some of it stays on the screens.  To help clean the screens, I used a bottle of Windex Outdoor Glass Cleaner.  This product attaches to the hose.  First you rinse the window with clear water, then add the soap solution, then rinse it off with clear water again.  Since this is done from the outside (with the windows all closed), the screens get washed off too.

It took one bottle and 1.5 hours to wash all the windows this way.

Then I washed each of the windows, outside first, then inside, using a bottle of Windex (or a generic equivalent) and a squeegee.  This took another 5 hours, over two days, for all the windows.

The hardest window to clean was the second story fixed window in the computer room.

This window seems to have water spots on the outside that will not wash off.  Maybe the result of hard water or acid rain.

Inari

After Jita died, Kathryn got two new cats (kittens).  One of these, Inari, developed cancer of the lymph nodes (large lymphocyte lymphoma).  So she joined Pepper and Jita in Zone 2.

We don't expect this to be a common occurrence, but it does raise the question of how we would bury a pet once all the irrigation and landscaping is in place.

The slightly raised area where Inari is should settle over time.

Fence work for the West Lawn

After laying out the rough river of rocks, we can see the other areas of the West Lawn that need work.  One is the fence line from the pool of blue rocks up to the corner of the fence.  We have had a continuous problem of bamboo coming under the fence from the neighbors and popping up in what should be our lawn.  The lawn does not actually grow, probably due to the heavy shade from the fence, the oak tree, and the jungle.

To solve this, and make this side of the yard well-defined, we are going to do the same "dig down to bedrock, pour a cement wall, and top it with a layer of limestone" that we have done on almost all of our other fence lines.

As we dig, we are finding a large number of bamboo roots, and are pulling those out.

As is normal for our back yard, we dig down a foot or two and we hit solid rock.

We have to be careful as we dig -- the French drain runs next to this in the lawn.

Once we have about half of this section dug up, we can frame it for concrete.

And then pour the concrete.

 Move the forms down.

And pour the second part of this first section.

Then the third part.

Rain and cold weather slowed down this work, but after pouring this third part of the fence wall, we continued digging.

and continued.  Rain and cold weather slowed us down, but we have it completely dug out.

We can then pour the last section of the concrete wall.

giving us a continuous wall of concrete down to bedrock along this entire section of fence.

Now we put the white limestone blocks on the top of the cement wall, to give it a finished look.

And then we can put the dirt back in the ditch.

This entire process -- from starting the digging, pouring the concrete, putting the stones on top, and filling in the digging -- took about two months.

Rough Layout of The River of Rocks

The East Lawn now seems done, so we turn our attention to the West Lawn.  The plan says this is dominated by the River of Rocks -- a "path" of flat rocks running from the fence gate around to the back patio walkway.

We have been putting aside all the flat rocks that we've found while we were digging up the rest of the yard and just storing them on the West Lawn area.

There is so much shade in this area that there is little (if any) lawn there.  We have an area near the front of Liriope that we moved from the front beds (since it was being eaten down to the ground by deer).

So the task at hand is just to move the rocks around, trying to fit them together, like a very large jigsaw puzzle, to form the "River", and run it around to the patio walkway.  This takes a couple of days.

Monterrey Oak tree bed

We left a big space around the bottom of the Monterrey Oak for some plantings and mulch.  The landscape plan shows this as either (a) Texas Colombine or (b) Dianella variegated Flax Lily.  The person at Barton Springs Nursery says that the Flax Lily was all-season, while the Colombine died back in the winter.  So we went with the Flax Lily.

We planted 6 of the Flax Lily, in two clumps of three, and then mulched the whole area (8 bags).

Grass for the East Lawn

With the digging and dirt done for the East Lawn, the question becomes what to put down in this space.  The landscape plan has it as lawn.  The City of Austin suggested using Zoysia Palisades as a grass that needs little maintenance and is drought tolerant.  We experimented with two pieces last year and it seemed to survive, so we will continue with it.

We find several places that sell Zoysia Palisades, and using Angie's List, we decided to use The Grass Outlet.  They sell Zoysia Palisades for $200 a pallet.  Each pallet is supposed to cover 450 square feet, and my estimate is we need 800 square feet.  The total cost, including delivery is $497.95.

The first pallet covered one end, leaving space around the base of the Monterrey Oak tree.

The second pallet gets us all the way to the end of what we have worked on so far.

This ties in nicely with the new walkway flagstones.

And we had a small amount left over, as expected, so we spread that out in the small area near the Bamboo Grove behind the Jungle.

This area will be interesting, since it has no irrigation (at least so far). (Update: all this grass died.  Clearly need irrigation to get it established, at least.)


One of the main questions in this work was should we install the sod now (early Fall), or wait until next Spring.  We decided that, temperature and water-wise, now should be about the same as the Spring, and it can rest over the Winter, before going into the heat and stress of next Summer.  Plus it will give us a grass cover instead of mud for the next few months.  And, in this particular case, we were fortunate enough to put the sod down just the morning before getting 0.5 inch of rain, followed by 1.5 inches the next day.  So we are getting it well watered in its new home.

Digging up the East Lawn, Irrigation, Zone 4

Having dug up the East Lawn, and brought in another dirt to even things out, we are ready to install a sprinkler system and a lawn.  We have zone 4 of the 11 irrigation zones in reserve for this area, so we just have to plan it out.

We pick the RainBird 1800 sprinkler heads -- they have adjustable angles, plus a fixed 180 degree and 360 degree.  And we will put bubblers by the two trees -- the one that is there now and the new one to be planted.

We laid out about where everything went using old PVC pipes.

And once we had it laid out, we trenched where the lines went.

We are using a 3/4 inch PVC pipe, with 1/2 inch Tees for the RainBird 1800 sprinkler heads.  We glue all the pieces together, test it out, and then fill the trenches back up with dirt.

Somehow in this process, we ended up with not enough dirt to fill things up, so we went to Whittlesey Landscape Supplies and got two more cubic yards of dirt -- professional mix ($86.92).

This allowed us to fill in the trenches and smooth out the backyard that has been dug up. 

We moved a volunteer tree to one of the spots where we want a tree in the back yard, and also moved the two pieces of Zoysia Pallisades to close to the patio walkway (to get it out of the way of the irrigation lines).

We should let this settle for a bit, and then put down new grass.

Finishing the stone work along the fence

We have stone, on top of a cement wall going down to bedrock, along much of the fence, from the driveway, along the raised garden, the South bed, and all the way to the electrical box in the middle of the back yard.  The next section to do is from the electrical box to the Bamboo Grove.

 The basic approach is to dig down to bedrock,

 and just continue that until we get to the other end.

After we extend the ditch far enough, we mark the fence and attach a black plastic sheet to separate the cement wall on our side from the earth on the other side.

And then we can create the forms -- sheets of Masonite, separated from the fence by 1x4 and 2x4 pieces (to create a 3.5 inch gap).  Bags of mulch and compost hold the Masonite sheet in place.

This first form is only about 14 feet long.  After it is done, we extend it along for a second section.

And when these forms are removed, we have the basic cement wall that we want for this section of the fence.

The third portion of this work extends the digging along the fence all the way to the Bamboo Grove.

and we can then trim it up along the fence to get a clean line for the concrete pour.

We frame it up and pour the concrete -- 10 bags of it.

and removing that finishes the concrete wall support, all the way from the electrical box to the Bamboo Grove.

Adding the limestone blocks on the top of the concrete wall finishes out the construction for this area.

This took two bags of masonry mix.

Then we have to move the pile of dirt back into place, filling the yard up next to the new limestone blocks.

We still have a small pile of dirt left over.  Presumably we will need that when the dirt next to the fence settles, over time.

This whole process took about 2 months, from Aug 1 to Oct 1 (but there were other things going on at the same time).