This Old #%&@*$ House

mindset.threat wrote:

My gf shot down the utahraptor/velociraptor idea :(

I'm struggling to see how this relationship will work. But if you're determined that gf > velociraptor statue, there are always Walmart moonie gnomes. Lots of upside to these.

IMAGE(https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/cb9418b8-5113-4201-9cdc-0cec971aa781_1.1926a8e15cc3c1c6b0424951b024be88.jpeg?odnHeight=450&odnWidth=450&odnBg=FFFFFF)

My brother was in his house about a month before he got summons from the city. He didn't realize he'd committed a horrible crime by letting his shrubs grow 1 inch onto the sidewalk...freaking neighbors ratted him out!

mindset.threat wrote:

My brother was in his house about a month before he got summons from the city. He didn't realize he'd committed a horrible crime by letting his shrubs grow 1 inch onto the sidewalk...freaking neighbors ratted him out!

Or 5-0 drove by and reported it to the city on a slow day.

So glad I don't live anywhere near places that have lawn ordinances.

mindset.threat wrote:

My brother was in his house about a month before he got summons from the city. He didn't realize he'd committed a horrible crime by letting his shrubs grow 1 inch onto the sidewalk...freaking neighbors ratted him out!

Snitches get stitches.

DSGamer wrote:
mindset.threat wrote:

My brother was in his house about a month before he got summons from the city. He didn't realize he'd committed a horrible crime by letting his shrubs grow 1 inch onto the sidewalk...freaking neighbors ratted him out!

Snitches get stitches.

Naw, he's trimming shrubs so:

Snitches get switches.

To be fair, I hate people that let their bushes grow over the sidewalk and crowd it out. Very inconsiderate. However 1" is nothing it wouldn't have bothered me really. I'm talking about the people that do stuff like this:

IMAGE(http://seeclickfix.com/files/issue_images/0019/2256/Bush.jpg)

I didn't even know you could call the city and they would care, but I guess that makes sense if it is blocking the sidewalk.

That right there sucks. Notice the little path in the grass where people are actually walking.

I live in the "well-to-do suburbs" where you you look like an idiot if you don't a) have a well manicured lawn and b) don't have landscapers taking care of it.

After nine years I finally felt "rich" enough to hire landscapers. We don't do any extra chemicals or fertilizers; just lawn cutting. It really frees up our weekends, but I still hate the idea to maintain a lawn. I landscaped all through high school and college and truly hate taking of care of a huge lawn.

I'd trade it for a rock garden or a different property with no grass in a heartbeat.

He lived in one of those "well-to-do" neighborhoods with an extremely anal homeowners association. There was also a racial element but I don't want to derail this into D&D territory.

While I don't particularly love doing yard work, for basic stuff that I can do myself, I have a hard time convincing myself to pay someone else to do it. This applies to basic maintenance on both the yard and the pool. Fortunately, after the major repairs were done, the pool's been pretty low maintenance this year. The solar cover keeps the chemical levels solid and the algae down, and I run the pool robot once a week, which does the bulk of the cleanup. Yay robots!

A friend of mine lives in a neighborhood with an HOA fee, but the fee covers the mandated landscape service that does all his yard work. Then he pays a pool service to maintain his pool. What's weird is that he doesn't have a ton of money. They actually delayed replacing their oven for a year because of budget, so I dunno.

I had a very small patch of grass not worth calling a yard and a couple trees on the easement. Probably spent an hour on average per week just cutting the grass, cleaning up weeds, garbage and leaves. Now that I have a an actual, but small, yard I just pay someone to do it.

You know what I really wish there was? A good way to pick up pine needles. I've got pine trees lining both sides of my lot, and they drop a ton of needles all the time. Raking them up is a huge pain because they're thin, and that also means the leaf blower does nothing to them. I really want some kind of vacuum that works on them.

Since they're such a pain, I usually don't deal with them, so I wind up with a thick mat of needles, which kills the grass, so when I do rake them, I get a big circle of dirt.

Browser ate my brilliant, and witty post. You would have been awestruck by my... ummm, awesomeness

The shed needles are 'designed' to leech chemicals (acidifies the soil, iirc) into the soil to kill off competition.

To avoid the creation of the 'dead zone,' I've heard of people vacuuming the footprint... frequently. Or, they leave the lower branches in place, but I don't think they'll grow back, once removed.

Blanket the area underneath with stone? Maybe a juniper could grow down there (I don't know if it can handle the needles, either)? *shrug*

There are lawn vacuums. Some landscaping companies, golf courses, etc... use them for grass clippings, leaf removal, pine needles. I think they start around $750.

I need to schedule people to come out and vacuum them up if that's an option. I have all giant 50+ year old pine trees everywhere.

It's awful.

I've still got some pine needles in my hallway from when I took the Christmas tree out of our house 6.5 months or so ago. I've vacuumed and swept many times, they're just persistent little things!

I have a lot that every fall gets all our leafs and also the entire neighborhoods blow up the street into my yard. We get A TON of yard waste. I bought this to help with cleanup along with a trashcan adapter to allow me to go a while before having to hike the leaf bin up the hill to my compost pile. It's a start. I honestly want that leaf vac trailer with extendable vacuum hose it's $1,000 which would totally be worth it but I have no place to store it.

Anyway, something like this might help you with your pine needle issue.

I live in an older neighborhood (platted in the '20s) on a 50-by-150 lot, with the house closer to the street than the back lot line.

Long story short, I gave up on grass in the front yard. A dogwood tree and a maple tree (with very shallow roots) suck up most of the water and provide too much shade for grass to grow. But my wife planted a moss garden, and moss is hella hardier than fescue anyway.

Lucky for us, the front yard slopes to the sidewalk. (It's about a 5-foot differential at the highest point between the yard and the street.) My green-thumb wife has covered the bank with all sorts of plants -- succulents, day lilies, ferns, bee balm, bulbs, etc. etc. etc. At one point we had a rosemary bush that was as wide as your wingspan, but that died recently and we've moved on.

TL,DR: Lots of plants will distract from the fact that you don't have grass in your yard.

I think I'm probably going to wind up being lazy and just living with the needles and dead zones.

It's especially awesome when the needles fall into the pool. Usually, the solar cover keeps most of them out of the skimmer, and I just scoop the majority out when I take the cover off. But if I'm lazy and leave the cover off the whole weekend, I get the skimmer basket overflowing with needles after a day and a half.

Stupid trees are tall enough that they block the sun from hitting the pool starting at around 1pm too, and my neighbors won't let us cut them down.

LeapingGnome wrote:

There are lawn vacuums. Some landscaping companies, golf courses, etc... use them for grass clippings, leaf removal, pine needles. I think they start around $750.

We rented a shop vac to vacuum the back yard a few years back after a cowboy contractor we'd hired to remove some 6'x6' glass panels the previous owner had installed to cover the deck removed them by hitting them with a hammer. I still occasionally find a sharp sliver of glass in my grass, to this day.

Chaz wrote:

I really want some kind of vacuum that works on them.

Shop vac with a "Cyclone"?

Chaz wrote:

It's especially awesome when the needles fall into the pool. Usually, the solar cover keeps most of them out of the skimmer, and I just scoop the majority out when I take the cover off. But if I'm lazy and leave the cover off the whole weekend, I get the skimmer basket overflowing with needles after a day and a half.

Bamboo is, apparently, the worst. Fallen leaves all the time. As our pool has bamboo down its entire length, I had the pool installers put 6 skimmers in. They think it's a little overkill but agree that the pool will remain leaf-free on the surface. We won't have a cover and I don't want to be skimming the pool every time I want to swim.

I hate pine needles and have a good section of pine needle/dirt at the back of my yard where the grass is sparse but I still need to mow it and kick up clouds of dirt every time I mow due to it. I have .4 acres and outside of getting rid of the 6+ pine trees back there I don't know what to do.

Moggy wrote:

Bamboo is, apparently, the worst. Fallen leaves all the time. As our pool has bamboo down its entire length, I had the pool installers put 6 skimmers in. They think it's a little overkill but agree that the pool will remain leaf-free on the surface. We won't have a cover and I don't want to be skimming the pool every time I want to swim.

Six skimmers seems like...a lot. I've got an 18x33' oval, and one skimmer deals with that, despite trees on either side. But, as my posting history has proven, I'm not a pool expert.

Moved into our house yesterday. So I might raise this thread for a bit with questions. My first one, we have a heat pump for cooling, but my wife said the handyman that was over today said there was no filter. Is that a thing?

Like,no spot for one, or there is a spot and it's just missing and needs to be replaced?

Chaz wrote:

Like,no spot for one, or there is a spot and it's just missing and needs to be replaced?

My wife's there with him, so this is a bit like telephone, but she says he said there's not one on the return. That it's on the furnace? Is this how heat pumps work?

Depends on your system. Forced air heat pump? Probably has a place. Maybe call the guy to get more information?

There really should be a filter there (maybe the previous tenant/owner just thought it was too much of an annoyance and took it out?), it is a LOT easier to replace a filter than it is to clean the coil...

The air moves: (return) duct > filter > coil > fan+motor > (supply) duct

The filter is there to clean the air before it comes in contact with the coil (the tightly-packed fins that put heat into, or pull heat out of, the air)... and the fan-blades... and the motor... and into the rest of your house.

PS: if it hasn't been there, for a while... you're probably going to need to clean the coil or the system is going to struggle to heat/cool (metal transfers heat waaaaay better than dirt)

There absolutely has to be a filter on a heat pump system. I've had two in my life. My current system has a filter holder built into the air handler. (A removable piece covers the hole in the side of the unit where it goes.) A previous system put the filter right at the mouth of the return duct, which was under a grate in the floor.

A corollary: If you do figure out the filter situation, make sure to change it every once in a while. Every month to six months (depending on the filter and/or the system) is probably fine. Every three years isn't, which is how I burned out an air handler once. (Technically it killed itself to save itself, or something. That's how the tech explained it to me at the time.)