Turning51

The dogs and I are relaxing at an Airbnb right here in Tucson, for which I’m very thankful, although I’d rather be home. No, don’t worry, nothing horrible happened. The house didn’t burn down. John didn’t finally get fed up and kick us out. We’re just in an especially difficult few days of the resumption of the remodel project, and I rented an Airbnb to keep the dogs safe and myself sane.

I’m hoping John joins us tonight, but he is working hard, prepping the house for the next set of contractors coming in the morning. I do not understand why it’s impossible to find a contractor willing to take the time to adequately hang plastic to protect the contents of the home from the inevitable clouds of dust. The say they will – but we’ve yet to find one that does as good of a job as John does. And that drywall dust; it’s not just on surfaces, it gets into drawers and clothes, and you’re still finding it years later. So that’s what John’s at home doing – hanging plastic; while the dogs and I are resting on the couch in the Airbnb.

John may end up working late, and he will probably decide to sleep at home, so he’ll be there already when they show up early tomorrow. At least they dang well better show up tomorrow morning, because I went to the expense and bother of moving to an Airbnb!

The dogs and I have been here three hours and they are finally calming down. Biscochito didn’t eat dinner. But JoJo – there’s no amount of anxiety that’s going to get between her and her dinner. She’s a chunk, but it’s against my philosophy to put a growing puppy on a diet, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. (And how she grows.)

So far I’ve not even bothered to use treats to train her, except one or two tiny bits a day, because she is so easily trained. But if I did need to treat train her, she would be a champ. Remember how Kai would sit at attention for long periods of time at the closet where we kept the dog food? JoJo is 3/4 poodle and a lot like Kai. Biska-Biscochito is less than half poodle, and doesn’t look or act like a poodle at all.

That’s my new nickname for her by the way. It’s alliterative or something. What happened was I was updating her records with the city (why I was doing that is a whole other story, for another time), when I realized that about 50% of her vet records are under the name Biska, and the other half under the name Biscochito. So to avoid confusion, I put both names in. I promptly got an error message saying I can’t use the same form for two different dogs and to start another record, but it ended up taking the two names ok. So now she’s officially Biska Biscochito.

Anyway, we’re here, at the Airbnb, and I’m grateful to be here, although I miss having a doggie door. Biscochito wants to be outside, Jojo wants to be inside, and neither are particularly comfortable anywhere in this strange place without me. And I can’t be in two places at once. Meanwhile, I’m regretting that I forgot my fresh spinach, and butter, and jam, and crackers and ice cream, and there’s no salt, and I don’t remotely have enough energy to go to the store, and the dogs aren’t comfortable being left alone here anyway, and it doesn’t seem important enough to use Instacart, when there’s perfectly good food in the refrigerator. I brought an entire cooler worth of stuff. I will survive. I will certainly survive without the spinach. Not so sure about surviving without the ice cream though.

So what’s going on at home that’s so invasive that I felt like I had to get out for a couple of days? We are having all our interior doors replaced. Some of the doorways are also being expanded. It’s an old house, and we prefer more modern doorway widths when possible, to better accommodate wheelchairs, and moving furniture in and out. Doing all the doorways at once means there’s nowhere I can put the dogs safely away from the workers (or myself away from the noise).

If it wasn’t 100 degrees out (literally) and if we weren’t also in the middle of the wall project, the dogs and I could have just hung outside all day. But nope. The door project didn’t get off the ground as fast as I’d hoped (construction projects never do). Not only is it very hot, now we are backed up against our big summer trip, which starts in 10 days. It would be nice to have the bandwidth to get ready for the trip, rather than dealing with the inevitable daily issues surrounding remodel projects.

In 10 days, we are driving to New Mexico on our way to Garden City (our new townhouse is officially in Garden City, a narrow strip of differently-incorporated neighborhood following the river, with Boise surrounding it on both sides). After we’ve been in Garden City a few days, John leaves for an overseas trip (about which I will tell you more later). I’m not going overseas myself because it sounds like too much for me nowadays with all my various health limitations. It also sounds like a very wonderful itinerary and I’m glad he’s taking the chance to travel like he’s always wanted to do. I will stay in Garden City with the dogs while he’s gone.

When he gets back, I’m going to drive down to meet Laura in Sacramento. And when I’m back from that, we’re going to Vaughn, Washington, where we went last year (where we left the boat). Remember when I posted sunset-over-the-water photos day after day after day last August? I couldn’t help it. Each one seemed better than the last one.

In 10 days we leave – in 10 days we need to be fully packed for an entire summer of activities, including John’s overseas trip, the stuff for the boat (there is an incredible amount of stuff needed for a boat, although most of it we left up there last summer), plus everything I want to bring to Garden City that I didn’t manage to get packed and ready for John and Dan’s trip up there at the end of March…it will be a very full van!

Wait, did I fail to blog about John and Dan’s trip up to Garden City with an enormous moving van? I was going to link to it for reference, but I can’t find it. I must not have posted it.

Here is the short of the long story. I spent half the winter sorting through our too-much stuff, separating out nearly a household worth of possessions to send up to the new townhouse. The topic was causing a certain amount of grumpiness between John and I, (John wasn’t entirely enthused about me buying that townhome, truth be told), and I wanted to hire movers. I am too old to be hauling furniture around. But you know John – he prefers to do as much as he can by himself. I suggested he take his brother up there instead of trying to do it alone, and Dan was good enough to go up with him.

Dan said John was grumpy the whole trip until the last day, when the sun came out, and everything was done and lo and behold, it all worked out. Also he bought an old Jeep Wrangler to keep up there, so that certainly helped.

We have so many cars now, I’d have to stop and count. But we needed something more practical in Garden City than just my tiny electric BMW I3 that’s so old it has almost no range at all. I love the I3 though. Best car ever made, in my opinion. Just needs a better range. Really too bad they don’t make them anymore!

The Wrangler is old too, and John is looking forward to working on it; he’s been wanting a project car. As if we don’t have enough projects! But there are fun projects and not-so-fun projects. I think we’re both tired of remodeling. That’s definitely become a not-so-fun project. Time to move on to more fun projects.

Most of the rest of the photos John took on that trip were of things like leaky faucets and piles of boxes, so I guess that’s why I never made a blog post about it. Plus I wasn’t there. I either need to be there, so I have what to bla about, or I need good photos, one or the other.

Oh hey, I guess they did take some photos at Hoover Dam on their way out there. This is John’s brother, Dan.

The rest of these I’m just going to post without comment, because your guess is as good as mine.

Yikes, ok, here’s a comment. Am I the only one out there who literally gets sweaty palms looking at these? This is why John can’t take me anywhere. I can’t even handle the photos! Eeek!

Ok, well, I like this last one.

When we bought our house in Tucson in 2020, our backyard was just cement, dirt, dead grass and the pool. It was partially enclosed by a badly painted wall along the alley and a slump block side wall that went right down the middle of the backyard.

In this next picture, the wall down the middle of the yard is on the left. We painted the blue wall a neutral buff color, and put a few plants in the flower border in the enclosed section.

The other half of the backyard was behind some iron fencing, but there was no privacy and Biska would bark at everyone who went by if we allowed her back there.

We attached bamboo screening to the metal fence which helped a bit, but it was still easy to see through it. So we just kept the gate shut between the two backyards, and didn’t use the fenced area for very much.

We’ve been meaning to expand our yard space by enclosing more of the yard behind a wall ever since we moved in over 5 years ago. But we put our remodel project on hold about 3 years ago and are only now getting back to it.

Remodeling is never fun, but I am very excited to have this wall in progress! However, I was not so excited last week when they were removing the old wall and trenching for the foundation of the new one. Jackhammers and backhoes started before 6:00 in the morning!

You might wonder why we were ok with them starting so early. By this late in the spring, it’s already very hot in Tucson. It’s not safe for workers to be out doing manual labor in the mid to late afternoon heat. So early hours are tolerated in this region. In fact, it is not uncommon for work to happen all through the night.

For example, there was a water leak in the alley earlier in April. It was a small leak and clearly not a priority for the city. John had to call them a couple of times before they reluctantly decided to do something about it a few days later. But despite the fact that it was not an emergency, they started working on it around 9:00 at night, breaking off sometime after midnight (maybe? Or maybe I finally went to sleep despite the noise?) All I know is that the work was in full swing again by 4:00 in the morning.

The only thing worse than a backhoe trenching in the middle of the night is a backhoe with an insanely loud “Beep! Beep! Beep!” back-up warning, trenching in the middle of the night. The neighborhood had barely recovered from that night before we started our wall project!

The first thing they did was take out the metal fencing. Here’s a photo of the half of the backyard that had metal fencing. On the left is the wall that goes down the middle of our backyard. Our pool is on the other side of it.

In the next photo, taken from the alley, you can see the original wall and the center wall are still intact, only the metal fencing has come down. That’s our hot tub sitting there along the alley behind the meter. It will be great to have the hot tub enclosed behind a tall block wall instead of a metal fence with bamboo screening!

What a mess, and it’s wide open to the alley and the street.

Next they removed the slump block walls; the original one along the alley and the one that was added sometime later, that divided the backyards into two. Now you can see out from the main backyard into the second half of the backyard (and on into the alley and street).

The perimeter wall is built on our property line, which goes to the edge of the alley but 12 feet back from the street curb. That 12 foot buffer is the city easement. This means our side yard will be narrow, but we decided it was still worth enclosing it. We could have simply enclosed the two sections of backyard, removed the center wall between them, and called it good. We would have ended up with a bigger backyard and the project would have been cheaper.

But we decided to go ahead and also enclose the narrow side yard and a small portion of the front yard as well. Even though the space is narrow, the wall will provide shading along the intensely hot south side of the house, as well as a southern exposure patio for use in the winter. It will also provide privacy for the windows along that side of the house; our front living room, guest room, and office.

Trenching. Looo-ooots of trenching. Beep! Beep! Beep!

The wall is going down the alley, then all along the street side of the house, following the curve of the street corner, and coming up along one side of our front walkway. We will have at least twice as much enclosed space as before.

This is the small section of front yard that will also be walled in. The curve of the wall follows the curve of the street corner. Our front door and garage will be outside the wall.

We are trying to save as many plants as we can. Everything in this next photo we planted ourselves. It’s been a few years!

We didn’t plant this palm, but we are hoping to save it.

We didn’t plant this palo verde either, but it has grown a lot since we moved in.

This is just one of several kinds of native palo verdes. The contractor called it a “weed” and I mostly agree. I’d like a nicer tree instead, but John wanted to keep it for now. I’ve put some effort into pruning it over the years, so it’s actually not too bad. But it’s thorny and doesn’t naturally have a good shape, sending branches every which way.

Here you can see the footing cement has been poured around the rebar.

Block delivery!

They are utilizing the vacant lot on the other side of the alley as a staging area, and they moved some logs that were laying along the edge of the alley, presumably to keep vehicles off the property. The owner of the vacant lot showed up at our door the other day to request that we leave the property as we found it when we were done. He was quite nice about it. John assured him we would.

It will be the vacant lot owner’s turn to be a nuisance soon enough – he plans to build back there as soon as the utilities are ready. John didn’t ask him what he plans to build. I guess John didn’t want to know! At least we will have our wall done before the vacant lot construction starts. Even so, we might end up fleeing to Boise for the worst of it. Unfortunately we have to be here for our own construction. But an entire building is going to take much longer than a simple perimeter wall. We are not looking forward to when the vacant lot gets developed.

Our contractor frequently has the entire alley totally blocked, but he managed to clear enough of it to get the garbage truck through on Thursday. In these old sections of Tucson, we have large dumpsters in the alley instead of individual garbage carts along the streets.

The orange slump block will be the topper.

John had pulled out his irrigation lines and was trying to save them, but they are being crushed under the pallets of cement block.

You can see the first bit of wall going up on the far left. This is the alley side, our back wall.

Then later, more wall is up. Progress!

This next photo is of the south side of the house along the side street, Seneca.

These are facing bricks to go on the vertical sides of the gate openings. Like the toppers, they are also slightly oranger than the block wall. It should blend well with the house, which has both color tones.

John spends a lot of time trying to make sure they don’t do dumb stuff, but we can’t be everywhere all the time. They poured footing cement right over the power line to the fountain.

John is also making sure they install some conduit so he can get irrigation lines (and power cords) back and forth under the wall.

John is going to be pressed for time, trying to get the irrigation reinstalled after the wall is done but before we leave for Boise, less than 2 weeks from now. And I don’t want to delay our departure because we plan to go to a music festival in Silver City, NM on our way up to Boise. It’s the only music festival we’ve had time for this spring. We missed the one in San Diego, which is happening right now. I intended to go back to this year, since I was so sick last year I could barely enjoy it. But we needed to be here for this wall project. So hopefully we can go to the San Diego festival next year.

It’s gotten mercifully quieter since the demolition and trenching finished. Now they are quietly laying block, with a small mixer going for the mortar. When we’re outside we can hear their music (oldies hits), and sometimes their conversations. But no more jackhammers and backhoes at dawn.