Old House Crazy

Buy Mulch in Bulk – It’s Cheaper and Easier

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Robert

After we moved to the south side of Atlanta, Christy and I discovered the wonderful place that is the Georgia Farmer’s Market in Forrest Park, GA. It’s just south of the airport on I-75 and has fresh produce direct from Georgia farmers (and others) year round. Inside the fence, there is a place called Super Sod that sells several varieties of sod, landscaping products, and mulch by the cubic yard.

Luckily, we discovered this place early on during our homeownership, so we’ve never bought mulch by the bag at Home Depot or Lowes. However, I have looked at the prices over there and it boggles my mind that people mulch their entire yards using bagged mulch. I think it might actually be cheaper to rent a pickup for a day, load it up with mulch, unload it at your house, and return it than it is to buy mulch by the bag, at least on a large scale.

At Super Sod, 1 cubic yard of pine nugget mulch is 38 dollars. That’s two scoops from their bobcat tractor bucket. I bought 1 scoop for 19 dollars and you can see what that looks like in the bed of my truck. It’s a LOT of mulch. My buddy David owed me some work after I helped him build a cedar table for his Big Green Egg, blog post forthcoming, so you can see him unloading mulch from the bed of my truck.

I know that all of you don’t live near Super Sod in Atlanta and all of you don’t own a truck to go pick up the mulch yourself, so it may only seem reasonable to you that you buy mulch a few bags at a time. However, I think it would be worth your time to look into buying it in bulk. Even if you can’t go get it yourself, most of these places deliver. Super Sod charges $75 to deliver up to a dump truck load of mulch. If you’re covering a lot of ground, buy in bulk. You’ll save money and be happier with the results. That’s my two cents. Thanks for reading. -Robby

Fixing Up an Old Cigar Table – Part 3 – Staining

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Robert

For the last few days, I’ve been working on cleaning up this old cigar table for a coworker of mine. She had asked that I replace the wood screws and tighten up the wobble in the legs, but I thought I could do a little more. Below, you can see the table as I received it. It was wobbly, was missing screws, had no door, and had the original stain covered up with paint.

To review Part 1 and Part 2, I disassembled the table, sanded for about four hours, put it all back together, and filled in the cracks and screw holes with wood putty. I also fabricated a new door and a new wood panel for the top of the cabinet portion of the table. After the wood putty cured for 24 hours, I sanded it flush with the rest of the legs and stained the entire table using Minwax Early American wood stain. I’ll probably add a coat or two of polyurethane to protect the new finish, but haven’t as of yet. I think the new and old panels match really well with the new stain. While you can still see the putty in the wood screw holes, I believe it looks much better than holes. It’ll also keep the wood screws from coming lose again in the future.

If you’ve got an old piece of furniture like this, I think you can make yourself really happy by spending some time fixing it up instead of throwing it out. My costs for this project were under 50 dollars, not including time in the shop. Since it’s you and your shop/basement/driveway, your time is free so go wild. Impress yourself with your skills. Save something beautiful. You’ll be glad you did. Thanks for reading. -Robby

Posted in Better than store bought, DIY, Don't Hire a Professional, Restoration, Tools and Techniques | Tagged DIY, diy project, don't hire a professional, Furniture, tools and techniques | Leave a comment

Digging Up Problem Weeds and Planting Hydrangeas in the Front Flower Bed

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Robert

Our front flower bed has been pretty neglected over the last three years. I’m pretty sure it was also neglected long before we bought the place. The few little things we’ve done include moving five azaleas from this bed and planting them in a line next to the driveway and extending the lariope all the way around the bed. Other than that, you can see that the bed was pretty overrun with weeds, most of which just keep coming back, no matter how many times I poison them or cut them back.

Weedy vines just keep growing, no matter how many times you cut them back.

You can see through this series of photos that these weeds have got pretty substantial root structures. Many of the weeds, especially the vines, have little bulbs attached to the roots underground. These are specialized structures that the plant uses to store energy, just in case it needs to start over. Each time you cut one of these down, it uses stored energy to regrow. Just as soon as it has green leaves, it begins storing energy again. This is exactly the same as a potato, but on a different plant.

The weedy vine above and the mimosa plant below are impossible to get rid of unless you dig up their roots.

Above you can see a few Holly plants that look tiny from above ground. If you cut them, they’ll just keep coming back because of their huge roots.

After I’d cleared the beds, I dugs two holes for nice little hydrangea plants that we picked up at the hardware store. I mixed a shovel or two of good worm castings from our worm bin into each hole and plopped in the hydrangeas. Sorry I don’t have more photos of the planting process. It began to rain as I was doing this so I hurried through the planting.

We’re planning to cover this whole bed with a 2-3 inches of mulch to help the plants and suppress future weeds. Over the next few years, the hydrangeas should get about 6 feet tall and really fill out the front bed. This way, we’ll have azalea blooms in the spring and hydrangea flowers in the summer. Thanks for reading. -Robby