Week 12: The Sprinkler Mystery and Decor

I am happy to report that we are pretty much all settled. Save for a few random boxes of things that I don’t know where to put, we’re unpacked and now into decorating mode. This is the fun part. Unpacking is for the birds, but I love decorating. Most of my motivation to unpack was simply because I was so extremely tired of seeing and living out of boxes. My anxiety level as a whole has been a lot lower since we got here, but now it’s even better. 

Last week we got the water feature out front to start flowing, but then quickly realized that the water was draining somewhere. When we first turned on the pump, there was still some water in the little pond at the bottom. For a little while, we debated on leaving the feature as is and having it serve as a dry bed, but once the weather started getting warmer, I realized that the standing water would end up being a cesspool for mosquito larvae. 

The next morning, we went out to turn it on. The remaining water in the stream wasn’t enough to flow all the way down so we started filling up buckets of water and bringing it to the stream. First, we couldn’t find the water spigot out front and I kept saying, “It has to be here somewhere. What kind of house doesn’t have a front spigot?!” I was exclaiming this as I was rolling buckets of water on Mr. WTF’s old longboard from the backyard to the front. Luckily for me, my mother-in-law was hunting for it too and found it around the side of the house through the trees. Side note, there’s a whole area back there that would be really suitable for some planter boxes, but maybe in years to come. Anyway, we found the spigot and started filling buckets from the front yard. It was a lot of hot and heavy work to find that the water disappeared over night. We thought that it might be evaporation, but it seemed like a lot of water was gone. The manual had no useful information for us either.  

I got a hose the next day and we filled it back up. I wasn’t about to haul more buckets! The next day it was all gone again so we turned it off. We also discovered around the same time that the sprinkler system wouldn’t turn on even though we were pushing the manual setting. All three of us looked and couldn’t figure it out, but assumed that there had to be something that we were missing. The landscaping was very pretty when we bought the house, so the sprinklers had to have been working.

We were right. We were missing something. Yesterday, Mrs. Fong was on a walk and saw our gardener working on a neighbor’s yard. She asked him to come by afterwards to see if he could fix our sprinklers. The neighbor who moved here from SF and recommended the gardener to us, said that she had the same problem. As it turns out, the valves Mr. WTF was turning weren’t the right ones. He was close, but there was a little valve all the way at the bottom of the valve box that we didn’t see/know to look for. The gardener turned it on for us and Mrs. Fong immediately heard the water turning on for the water feature. Problem solved. We’re not accustomed to having to “blow out” our irrigation systems during the winter to prevent pipes bursting. We figured that we had to do something different, but didn’t know what it was. Ta-dah! 

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Once the sprinklers did come on, we knew right away as the kids started squealing like a barn full of pigs. We realized early on that they were very excited that we have a lawn because we didn’t back in CA. Add sprinklers into the mix, and these kids minds are blown. Our neighbor from SF had her lawn taken out and put in a succulent garden. That is what I want to do for our place too, but will keep the lawn for now since the kids love it so much. It does look pretty nice if it’s not dying. 🙂

Our own little babbling brook. Good thing it came with the house because we wouldn’t have put it in ourselves! Being from California, we’re wondering what our water and electricity bills will be like next month.

I’m pretty relieved that we don’t have to keep watering everything by hand. Last week the pine trees all decided that it was time to pollinate and it’s EVERYWHERE, so I haven’t been going outside as much as I’d like to. I was sitting in the backyard with Lucas while he played. My back was to our pine tree when a gust of wind came through. Lucas was eating some kind of snack and he stopped, eyes got huge, and he goes, “Mommmmyyyyyy, the pollen!” I turned around and saw a yellow cloud blowing towards us. We got up and ran inside so fast. I didn’t know at the time how much more pollen was to come. It was a lot. It was a warm day so we had a lot of the windows open. I noticed that evening that there was pollen in our bathtub. I then walked around and found that there was pollen on almost every surface. When I vacuumed under the windows, the dust inside had a yellow tinge to it. Needless to say, Yesterday’s Maintenance Monday was a deep clean. I wiped down all of the windowsills and vacuumed the entire upstairs.

In other news, we have some new decor up and Mr. WTF put up the lights that I got to go over the kitchen island. 

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While we were putting up the lights, a lightning storm came through and we had to stop. After Mr. WTF put up the first light, he then discovered that the second light fixture had a whole different mount so he had to guestimate and put a hole into the new light fixture plate to make it fit. We’re still not sure why the previous lights had different mounts even though they were matching lights. The new barstools came in also.

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Mrs. Fong and I were waiting by the windows to see the rain as if we’ve never seen rain before.

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The downside of having sliding drawers in most of the cabinets is that my small appliances don’t fit. In the old house, we had a closet-style pantry where I’d keep them all on the floor. I had to really choose which appliances would stay inside the house and which would be outside in the garage. The Instant Pot and rice cooker are our most used small appliances so they won space in the slider drawers. I put our Vitamix, Kitchen Aid mixer and food processor on a microwave stand in the garage. I considered just keeping them in the boxes that they moved up here in, but I know myself and will FOR SURE not use them if they’re still boxed up. This way, I’ll at least see them to use even if they’re not directly in the kitchen. The garage door isn’t far off of the kitchen and at the old house, we kept a lot of our Costco items in the garage so we’d go to the garage every time we cooked anyway. So here’s to hoping that I’ll actually continue to use these. I know I’ll use the blender for sure, but the mixer and food processor are questionable. They’re just items that I know if I donated, I’d end up regretting it.

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If you recall, I started updating the dining room chandelier two weeks ago, but was waiting for paint. I painted the bronze portion under the bulb and think it’s a major improvement.

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  This was originally supposed to go in our family room, but the wall was so big that it would have looked even more lost.

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  Thinking about getting something to go in this spot, so mounted the pictures pretty high.

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  I’m painting the cube shelves white, but they’re not turning out as well as I’d hoped.

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  I put up the pictures in the guest room and waiting on the shelves to dry.

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  White Bird of Paradise

When I bought the plant, I originally thought it was a banana plant. Though face masks are required here, they’re not enforced in all of the stores. There were a lot of people crowding around the indoor plants at Home Depot so I grabbed the healthiest looking one and left. When I got home, I noticed the tag on the plant indicated that it is not a banana plant at all. It looks nice, at least!

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  Reid is wearing my flip-flops and almost fits them. Let me remind you, he’s only four!

One of our neighbor’s around the corner is a legitimate ice cream man. His house is a couple down from our community mail boxes so whenever the kids see the truck, they long for ice cream. On one of the days that we were trying to figure out the sprinklers, he drove by to go home. The kids got excited and ran to the driveway to see him. He must have seen them because he looped back around to introduce himself. He said that he was just getting back from his route and he always forgets that his own neighborhood has a lot of children. He was so sweet and gave us all free ice cream and the kids actually said thank you loud enough for him to hear. They could barely contain their excitement.

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Flowers are starting to bloom in our area. The top pictures are from our backyard and the kids picked daisies off the side of the road for me on a walk with Mrs. Fong.

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One of our more interesting learning time experiments this week was emulsion. I saw a video on Pinterest and we tried it out. It was pretty neat. I showed them a preschool-age emulsion video explaining the science behind why the oil and water don’t mix and then we tried it out.

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Digging up “fossils”.

Yesterday (Monday) we watched video on what paleontologists do and then dug up dinosaurs from kinetic sand.