How to Clean a Wood Deck

MY FRIEND LULA is extremely capable and extremely determined. Unlike myself, she’s not afraid of power tools, and no home-improvement project seems to daunt her (she’s been shingling her house herself, below, over a period of two years).

So when she offered to clean my front deck in exchange for a few days lodging at my cottage in Springs, N.Y. (hers is rented out), I said, “Hell, yeah.” This little deck has been black and grimy since I moved in two years ago, and gets slick when it rains. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had never been cleaned at all, or at least not in decades.

I had made one fairly ineffective pass over it a few weeks ago, as seen in the foreground, above; so the photo doesn’t even show it at its worst. Lula got down on hands and knees with a stiff scrub brush and a mixture of TSP heavy-duty cleaner and Clorox in hot water; let it sit for a good few minutes to kill mildew, and then rinsed with hot water. You can see the difference between her job and mine.

The cedar shingles on the house, too, could benefit by the same treatment, but that’s trickier, as they’re vertical and grooved. I’ve been resisting power-washing for fear that forceful treatment could have unintended consequences: lifting the shingles off, causing leaks, damaging the plantings around the house.

Meanwhile, the front deck is getting clean. One small step for woman…

I Wish I Had a Lot of Money

MY TO-DO LIST for 2010 is daunting.

In the past couple of months, I’ve come to a bit of a standstill on home improvements. Most of my list still lies before me. I wanted to do things fast when I first moved into this East Hampton cottage last May. On the other hand, it’s a good thing I waited on some of the projects, because I’ve changed my mind a lot.

Several months ago, I was thinking ‘stone patio.’ Now I’m thinking ‘wood deck.’

I was thinking ‘flagstone walk.’ Now I’m thinking….well, something else. I bought three 2’x3′ pieces of Pennsylvania bluestone and set them down to get an idea of how they’d look as a walk from the future parking court (still a priority) to the front door. Didn’t seem to work. Stone doesn’t have much place in this environment. There’s nary a piece of rock on the property, unlike upstate, where you’ve got massive granite outcroppings everywhere. This is sandy territory (well-drained, yeah!) Two feet of snow pelted by steady rain this past weekend got sucked right up into the ground, with very little puddling.

The wood fence for screening that seemed a must-do in high season, when there was a fair amount of road traffic, has faded in urgency (probably to return in May). I’d still like more enclosure, but I’ll try doing that with shrubs.

I’m glad I didn’t spend $4,000 on a deer fence, which seemed top priority a few months back. I haven’t seen any deer lately

Moments after I wrote the above words, I looked out the living room window and saw three large animals in the front yard. They were casing, if not yet munching, my newly planted arborvitae and holly. I rapped on the window. The rattling of the screens startled them for a nanosecond. I shrieked “Go! Go! Go!” One of them, a still-fuzzy adolescent, made eye contact with me. “Ohhhh, you’re beautiful,” I said.

Then I went and mixed up a couple of gallons of homemade deer repellent (cooking oil, dish detergent, pepper, garlic powder, chili powder) and went out and splashed the vulnerable specimens.

Instead of a deer fence, I’m embracing the challenge of deer-resistant gardening. So I won’t have roses. Or hostas. Or many other things.

Other items I thought were absolute musts turn out to be not so. Like the Malm fireplace I bought months ago that’s sitting uninstalled in my living room, through no fault of my own. First the roofer was going to do it; then he realized it was outside his “area of expertise.” Sag Harbor Fireplace came to do an estimate. I’m still waiting for the estimate. It’s their busy season.

Anyway, my little cottage is toasty. I know from experience that when you have a well-heated house, you don’t use the fireplace much. There’s one in the bedroom of the duplex in Boerum Hill. In the years we lived there, after spending thousands to line the chimney properly, we used it about twice.

Ultimately, it boils down to evil money, or lack thereof. My preference would still be to barrel through everything as quickly as possible. Of necessity, I have to do things in dribs and drabs. Which may not be so bad, if I’m going to keep changing my mind about them.

Boring Stuff

MAYBE SOME OF YOU HAVE NOTICED I’ve reduced my blogging schedule from daily (as if that was ever gonna be sustainable) to a few times a week. I’ve been occupied with such matters as:

• cleaning out my basement (still)
• painting a green rattan sofa white (Why does everything worth doing, like painting a rattan sofa, turn out to be either harder than it looks or more time-consuming than you think it’s going to be?)
• mulling over what to edge my driveway with — logs, railroad ties, steel, cobblestones, nothing — when I get around to having a driveway built
• considering what kind of material to use for a patio (flagstone, wood decking) when I get around to having a patio built
• paying bills that built up over two months of vacancy in Cobble Hill
• having house guests — better enjoy them now, I figure, they’re not going to come in January
• going to the beach:-)

I’m feeling very indecisive lately regarding my landscaping choices. Everyone who visits has different opinions. For instance, the old, misshapen, non-flowering cherry tree in the middle of the backyard. One friend says lose it. Another says prune it. A third says keep it. I say…I don’t know.

The roses of Sharon are blooming, weakly. They’re weed trees, essentially. I never knew how easily they sprout and how invasive they can be. The forsythia’s out of control too, to name another plant I always throught was ‘desirable,’ and took great pains to nurture along. Oh, and the wisteria’s back. It’s like something out of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, popping up again everywhere. A force of nature, like the ocean.

It’s August. Time to do nothing, I tell myself. Just to bide my time, until the landscapers’ calendars slow down and their prices get (hopefully) more reasonable. And I’ve made some decisions.

Deer count, last 24 hours: 4

Bluestone Patio by Old-School Stonemasons

RATHER THAN BLOG about my exciting day at the shopping mall (I went to the K-Mart in Bridgehampton for such essentials as a new toilet seat and a corkscrew), have a look at my friend Nancy’s new bluestone patio in Boerum Hill.

AFTER (well, during - it's not quite finished)

In my two-and-a-half weeks at her house, I managed to screw up her cappuccino maker and leave a couple of eggs on the stove so long they exploded, but on the plus side, I encouraged her to call Carlos Serna of Stones R Us, an Italian stonemason who re-built a collapsing retaining wall at my Boerum Hill house, and get going on the patio she’d been postponing for ages.

BEFORE

About 8’x10′ (the rest of our design concept calls for a slightly raised wood deck, to be built later this summer), the patio cost $3,800 and took 3 or so days for two men to accomplish, what with breaking up the existing concrete and carting it out, excavating several inches, laying a bed of gravel, setting the 2-foot-square bluestone slabs in a bed of sand, and trimming it with cobblestones.

The bluestone will darken and mellow with time, and the sand between the stones, rather than concrete, allows for the possibility of growing thyme or other greenery in between.

My Rented Garden: Nil to Abundance in 2 Seasons

WELL, THAT WASN’T SO BAD, WAS IT? Unless we get some late snowstorms (which have been known to happen), spring is just weeks away. My thoughts are turning to my backyard in Boerum Hill, going into its third season.

I’m a renter here, which means:

• I don’t want to spend much money
• I can’t do anything too invasive (my landlady doesn’t like it, and I’m scared of her)

But as my pictures show, you can do a lot with a little, and fast.

 

 

When I arrived in November 2006, I found a scraggly rectangle of lawn about 22’x40′. Along the back was a raised bed held back by a stacked stone wall. All totally devoid of plants, except for one glorious dogwood tree in a far corner. (The photo below shows the garden in April of ’07, by which time I had dug perimeter beds and stuck a few things in them.)

The grass was bordered on one side by some phenomenal hydrangea bushes that belong to my next-door neighbors but topple into my yard, and on the other side, by a hideous, depressing, 7-foot-tall chain-link fence.

My first thought was to disguise the prison fence by lashing rolled twig fencing (useful stuff; you can buy it online) to it with cable ties.  That didn’t fool anyone, plus it blocked light.

Then I asked my next-door neighbor on the chain-link side whether he’d ever thought of removing the fence. I went out for a few hours, and when I returned, the hideous, depressing fence was GONE! My dear neighbor (who also mows my lawn of his own volition) had done a masterful job of fence-removal in a single afternoon.

That first tentative, unimaginative step in the spring of ’07  — digging three-foot-wide planting beds around the perimeter of the rectangle — was followed by outreach to friends and neighbors. I filled the beds with with catch-as-catch-can plants from a variety of sources.

These included buttercups, irises, lilies from garden-mad neighbors in Boerum Hill who were dividing their excess, as well as:

• plants imported from my own country casa (including catmint and lady’s mantle, my favorite combination, and ferns transplanted from the woods)
• Lowes and Home Depot specials: gallon pots of euonymous, juniper, and other small shrubs for a few bucks
• annuals from the neighborhood plant sales – the Hoyt Street Association and Cobble Hill Tree Fund both have great ones in early May
• birthday gifts (I had the nerve to send party invitations reading “No gifts – unless it’s a plant!”)
• vegetable starters from the Borough Hall Greenmarket

The first season was good; by the second season, I had color that lasted from early spring through October (someone gave me asters!) You know what they say about perennials: “The first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they leap.” These seemed to be leaping pretty good by Year 2.

Summer 08

The color show is aided by containers of coleus and other annuals, and I cheat by placing large containers of annuals right in the beds. By mid-summer you don’t even see the pots.

It’s a north-facing garden, so it has challenges, but the sky is open. This past summer, I decided to try tomatoes for the first time. I bought two simple 4’x8′ raised-bed kits from a company in Massachusetts that makes them Colonial-style (they’re planks of cedar attached at the corners with pegs).

Then I made the classic newbie error of planting too much — 16 tomato plants, when four would have been sufficient. By August, it was out of control and an eyesore. I kept trimming and staking, trimming and staking; more trouble than it was worth. This year I’ll leave one raised bed in the sunnier position with herbs, lettuce, and a few tomatoes, and probably dismantle the other.

I’m raring to go with spring garden-cleaning. The next warmish weekend, I’m on it!