Raking, Blowing and Scraping.

One of the nice things Ms. Serpico did with the house was keep the yard really clean and neat. Of course, she was also a retired lady with a lot of time on her hands. That ain't us.

It's hard to believe we first looked at the house when the weather was still really warm--back in late September. This was the yard back then...

See that big-ass tree on the front lawn? Yeah, well... all of those leaves made a bee-line for the lawn when Autumn descended. I mean, it's nice to have a big front yard, but when my neighborly responsibilities involve clearing that yard of those extraneous leaves, I suddenly gain a hankering for the concrete jungle, where such suburbanite activities are virtually unknown.

Luckily, our truly ludicrous taxes pay for such niceties as block-by-block leaf removal. Yep. We don't even have to bag the leaves. All we have to do it get them onto the street in front of our house. Of course, the entire yard was covered with leaves by the time we took possession of the house back in late November, and we, being condo dwellers with a tiny yard, didn't own a rake at that time. And we figured it would be more important to work on the living portion of the house before we started messing with the yard, so we started on the projects you've seen in previous posts.

But the yard, dammit... the yard just wouldn't clean itself up. And the final leaf removal date loomed closer and closer... until it was almost upon us. It's this coming Wednesday, actually. So we had to deal with the yard. On the plus side, we were gifted with a nice leaf-blower (as I think I mentioned before), so I thought this whole thing would be a snap. Yeah, not so much. See, it rained on our leaves. The leaf blower is pretty powerful, but it's not powerful enough to move huge amounts of heavy, wet leaves without a lot of coaxing, and the driveway was very full of the aforementioned wet leaves.

So, while Avy and her dance-class ladies shook their booties in the basement, I took to the driveway with my little leaf-blower and got to work. I was out there for about two hours, and I swear it seemed like I didn't do anything but sort of move the leaves around a little bit. Part of the problem involved the wetness of the leaves, but the other part involved my attempts to keep from blowing leaves into my neighbor's clean yard and driveway. In the process of being a respectful neighbor, I really made things a lot more difficult for myself.

It was also dark and cold. I decided to let it go until Sunday, when Avy and I could work together.

Venturing into the living room and surveying the state of things, I knew we needed to work on the floors some more. Remember this crap?

Yeah. Most of the floor looked OK, but there was plenty of this action going on around the room. Plus staples. Lots of staples. The staples are annoying, but the dessicated, mummified, glued-on padding goo crap... that shit... man. After attacking this stuff with plastic scrapers and a scrub brush, it really didn't want to come up. I decided to carefully--very carefully--go after these eyesore areas with the dull edge of a box-cutter/carpet-cutter thingy.

That is some tedious work--scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape... brush... scrape, scrape, scrape... brush... sweep. Repeat. The good news is that it works really well. Here's the same area after the razor treatment...

Avy and I worked the razors while Angel (bless her heart!) crawled around, pulling up staples. That shit took hours. And I will admit to being somewhat obsessive/compulsive about this kind of thing--I really didn't want to stop until it was done. Of course, we did stop for dinner, which, by the way, came from the little Chinese take-out joint about four blocks away... and it was really pretty yummy. Good portions, no skimping on the good stuff, either. They gave us so much that we had leftovers!

I continued to work on the floors while Avy and Angel pulled down the chair rail in the living room and spackled over Ms. Serpico's many, many picture nail holes. The woman liked pictures, and she wasn't shy about using nails to put those pictures up on the walls of her home. Holy crap. So many nails.

Meanwhile, you could find me, crouched on the floor like some kind of floor-scraping version of Gollum--"The hardwoodses! They're precious!" In the end, we had this...

Now, I don't know if impresses you, but check it out--here's how it looked before we scraped...


Big, big difference. You can't see the five gazillion staples that were removed, but trust me, there were an assload. The floor is now safe for general use--you can walk around in socks and not worry about getting snagged on a nail or picking up nasty yellow dust/mummified carpet padding schmeg. Good stuff. My spine was crying, but the floor looks good.

On Sunday, we spent the day working on the front yard. Rakes came into play. The yard is now free of leaves, and we are now in the good graces of our neighbors. This shot was taken from the leaf pile. See that bare tree? Also, I am hoping our yard will turn green again later. The brown part makes it look like a giant dog used the lawn as a urinal.

Check the pile....

I think every single leaf from our tree landed in our yard and just stayed there. Sheesh. Now it's all in the street, awaiting removal by the township. Ah, suburbia.