our house
In April, 2006, my partner and I bought our first house. We live in Prince George’s County, Maryland, about three miles from the border of the District of Columbia. With the house came a yard and a single-car detached garage.
Year 1
Since moving in, we’ve been engaged in house-related projects both large and small. On the ‘large’ side, we’ve had to make extensive repairs to the roof, for which we hired some people with roofing skills. They did an excellent job, and in the process of arranging for those repairs we discovered that our house is located in an historic district, making it eligible for the Maryland Rehabilitation Tax Credit program, administered by the Maryland Historical Trust. The program is documentation-intensive, but well worth it for our house, that has several projects left to do. We’ll continue to work with the Trust as we prepare to repair the leaking foundation of the garage and brick over the hole in our back wall currently housing a non-functional air-conditioning unit.
Beyond these few repair projects, we have been tackling the standard interior work of grouting, caulking, plumbing, and painting. For a home built in 1938, it’s in quite good condition, and many of the jobs we’ve undertaken have been largely cosmetic or preventative. After years of doing minor repairs on rentals, we’ve become quite handy, and are pleased to be able to do much of the work on our home ourselves.
This summer and fall, I’ve also done quite a lot with the yard. My ultimate goal is to have our backyard certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat through the National Wildlife Federation. To that end, we have been working to eradicate the invasive ivy from the ground and trees, pulling out weeds, and pruning back the scrub. Over the next few years, I plan to put in new fences, a small pond, kitchen vegetable and herb gardens, sand-packed flagstone patio, wood chip paths, and–of course–a wide assortment of native plants. In terms of basic maintenance, we hired a tree company to prune the large sugar maple in the front yard, cut some dead branches from the maple in the back, and clear the vines from our cherry tree.
Year 2
We kicked off our second year in the house with water pouring into our basement. Granted, it was a big rainstorm, but we were more than a little peeved, especially since the seller (a real estate agent) claimed there was no history of water in the house. The flow pf water revealed points of previous (poor) repairs and erosion, confirming our belief that his claim just wasn’t true. At this point, it’s our house, and we’ll deal with the drainage on the property; we just don’t recommend buying a house from this guy and are happy to discuss the myriad reasons, small to large.
With the appearance of a small river of water running through the basement, grading the yard became a higher priority. We continue to work on clearing the weeds and covering the side beds with mulch. In April, we were much engaged with drowning Eastern tent caterpillars and banding the cherry trees, hoping to avoid such an infestation next year. The peonies seem to have survived the great poison ivy spraying campaign of last fall, and I’ve added some additional specimens donated by a neighbor. It’s my hope that they will develop over the next few years into a nice drift along the side fence.
Throughout the summer we successfully cleared the weeds from the rear weed patch, most notably the pokeweeds. We also removed several small bushes and saplings that had sprung up under the holly tree and cleared the liriope from half of that bed. It’s my plan to naturalize lily-of-the-valley in the bed under the holly once the liriope is good and gone. In the fall, I collected leaves from our neighbors’ yards via wheelbarrow and created what I hope will be a killing mulch layer over the English ivy in the beds that edge the backyard. I also covered the weed patch, which had started to regenerate in late summer. While we weren’t successful at clearing the entire yard — digging out weeds on this scale takes far more time and effort than I’d imagined — we did manage to get a mulch down and I have high hopes for next year.
In addition to the work in the yard, we made slow but constant progress on the interior. We — and by ‘we’ I mean ‘my partner’ — caulked and regrouted the main bathroom upstairs. We removed the drop-down ironing board and cabinet from the family room wall and patched the hole, removed the electric heater from the wall in the downstairs bathroom and patched the hole, and removed the vent between the downstairs bathroom and the family room closet and patched the hole. We painted (most of) the family room an airy sky blue; we need to paint the rear wall but are waiting until we complete the removal the in-wall A/C unit. We have been persistently thwarted in our attempts to get that repair done: we have been unable to get a mason to actually come out to the house and give us an estimate for the job, or in some cases to even return our calls. So, if you are a mason who works on historic brick in the College Park area, send me an email!
I rounded out our second year in the house by working on the yard. We did buy a composter, and have been dutifully filling and rotating it. After much talk, I cleared and prepared the left foundation bed and planted two white azaleas under the living room window. It appears that I might have chosen a smaller variety than intended, but we won’t know that for a few more years. I made progress in clearing the weeds and liberated several plants — hostas, spiderwort, crocus, daffodils — from the stranglehold of liriope and ivy. Never fear: there’s still plenty more to do in the coming months.
Year 3
The beginning of this year has been rain, rain, and more rain. While this has been great for the garden, it’s dashed our hopes of being able to put off the foundation repairs for several more years. We’re interviewing contractors and collecting estimates, expecting to get that work done in about six months. Between now and then, we have several indoor projects for which we’ve received MHT approval: new ‘commodes’ (I learned quickly not to speak the word ‘toilet’ to the folks at the Historical Trust!), an exhaust fan in the main bathroom upstairs, and a fixture update for that bathroom. We also aim to remove the insulation from the attic rafters and add (new) insulation to the basement ones. There is also, of course, a decently long list of new appliances I would like to add to our household, along with such exciting innovations as closet organizing systems. You do what you have to do in an older (small-closeted) house!
The plans for the yard remain the same: kill, kill, kill! I continue to uproot liriope and ivy and steel myself to deal with the poison ivy thicket under our neighbor’s trees. If not for the degree to which small birds such as our resident Carolina Wrens love to eat and redistribute poison ivy berries, I’d be more content to leave it be. In the interest of not having it perpetually crop up in my own yard, I’m going to work on the nearest source.
This autumn will (hopefully this year) bring plant shuffling, as we move the roses to less crowded sites, and transplant the bulb flowers into places where they’ll get more sun. I’m working on identifying the four rose bushes that came with our house, in order to assess their space and trellis needs. Now that our neighbor has removed her towering magnolia tree, the south side of our houe gets quite a bit of sun through the day, making it a good possible site for the climbing rose. Not that I know much about roses, but I’m learning in order to preserve these nearly-antique plants.
Read what I’ve written about work on our house and yard.