Gray hair!

All this slumlording is giving me gray hair.... or maybe I just need to make sure I put on a hat before I start painting. It is truly incredible what a coat of paint can do for a room. I've been painting the smoke-stained ceilings, and the contrast between old and new is stark.

Think I might need two coats.

I'm pretty excited about the difference a few coats of paint can make. This bedroom looks completely unremarkable now. Which is the point. Wait until we get carpet, and you'll never know that this used to be a disaster zone.

And I'm not exaggerating when I call it a disaster zone. This is how the former occupants used their windowsills.

Eww.

Horrible jobs

Being a not-slumlord is hard work. We could just buy a filthy house, shampoo the carpets, spray on a coat of white paint and call it good. But that's not how we roll.

Here's bedroom #1. Notice the wallpaper border (which is barely attached), sagging closet shelf, hideous wall color, and painfully awful carpet. I spent a good afternoon removing wallpaper, scrubbing walls, sweeping the cobwebs off the ceiling, and spackling. I spackled 131 holes in this tiny bedroom. What are people doing to put 131 holes in a single room? They must have had an extensive collection of fine art.

This is job number 1. It's going to be nice to have at least one room in the house that's completely free of horribleness, because right now there is not a single room that is pleasant to be in.

Also on the list of horrible jobs: dead mouse removal. I did one, but then I got the heebie-jeebies and my sweet husband removed the next two. Strong, empowered women can do anything they want to. But every so often they just don't feel like being strong or brave. Especially if someone else will do the horrible job for them.

Three houses!!!!!

Our not-a-slumlord plan was going so smoothly that we decided to add to the collection of non-slums! This one, however, is going to take a little bit of work to arrive at our standards. Take a look at house number three:

It's a charming little cottage on 1.5 lots in the Victory neighborhood, which is the fanciest part of North. It's a block from the fancy restaurant Victory 44, as well as Emily's diner, which is my favorite greasy spoon on the North side.

And then you get to the front door, and you see this.

The front door is currently secured by only a padlock, because it was kicked in at some point in the past few months.

Ouch. This poor little house has been treated very poorly for a while. It kills me to see a cute little house so beaten down. So, naturally, I decided I had to have it!

And then I told my husband that we had to have it. He agreed, sight unseen. And then he got to go inside two days before closing. And his first thought was to question my sanity. Which is what I thought it might be. But he trusts the vision (or is starting to become the same kind of crazy I am), so we went ahead and got it.

It needs a little work. Or maybe a lot of work.

And every time we look a little closer, we're amazed at the shoddy work that has been done in this house. Don't worry, cute little house. We'll do it better! It would be impossible to do worse.

Not a slumlord!

The rental house needs a bit of love; the guy who used to own it thought he'd flip it for a quarter of a million dollars....and then the market crashed and it was suddenly worth an awful lot less than that. So, he stopped fixing and upgrading things about 8 years ago.

In swoops a girl with a South Dakota work ethic (and also, a need to pass a rental inspection to keep the license). The driveway project was the most fun thing we had to get done; everyone loves playing with construction tools.

Less fun? Dealing with this floor:

 Peel and stick floor tiles. Sometimes they loose their stick. And the parts that don't, stay very very sticky. It was a pretty riveting 4-hour process to peel up each individual tile with a putty knife.

And then, after 4 hours of peeling, and an hour or so of sticking new tiles down, I was feeling pretty good about the whole process. I'm so totally not a slumlord! Look at me taking care of my property! New driveway, new smoke detectors, new flooring! And then, as I neared the end of the process, I realized something. I'd made a math error. And was going to be exactly 1 tile short. And it was 9:45, and Home Depot closes at 10:00 and is a 15 minute drive away. And all the furniture from this room was outside on the deck.

So, slumlord solution: stick a piece of linoleum from the basement in the open spot. See, I fixed it! I went back a week later with the correct tile and the determination to fix it and not be slummy. But this corner was covered with furniture, so the linoleum will stay.....

Life!

After the great goldfish disaster of 2015, we decided to scale back our ambitions and only try to keep a half dozen goldfish alive. That has seemed like a much better plan; instead of mass die-offs, we've had about one die per month, so we're down to four. But they seem happy enough. It's hard to get a picture of four goldfish swimming in a giant black tank in a basement. This is the best I could get:

So just imagine these guys. Times two. But much happier with their lives because they've got 150 gallons of water to hang out in.

Also, it looks like the Cambrian Explosion in the grow beds. If the Cambrian Explosion had been limited to kale and kohlrabi. Check it out!

Maybe some day we'll get something else to grow, but for now these two vegetables seem pretty content with the setup.

Next step: edible fish!

Urban Harvest

There is food all around the neighborhood, if you know where to look. I love taking my students on walks in Wirth park in the spring and trying to feed them wood sorrel or garlic mustard. The first year students are always nervous to try random green things their weird sensei pulls out of the forest; by their third year they've accepted my crunchy ways and trust that I'm not trying to kill them.

Wood Sorrel. Notice the heart-shaped leaves. This has a bright taste, almost like lemon.

Garlic Mustard. It has cute little white flowers, but don't be fooled. It's an invasive plant species; pick as much as you can possibly eat! Put the leaves in a fresh green salad.

But this week I got an extra special treat--nettle tea! Most people avoid nettles. Might have to do with the stinging effect they have (think poison ivy, only slightly less horrible). But, if you are brave and wear gloves (and long pants and sleeves), and boil the leaves for a few minutes, you're rewarded with a super healthy green, and the water from boiling turns into a sort of green tea.

A neighbor posted this photo wondering what this plant was, and how to get rid of it:

Like the helpful person I try to be, I offered to remove it for her, and brought it home and boiled it and got a pitcher of this dark green liquid:

You're welcome to try some if you drop by the homestead! Also, give me a call if you have a nettle infestation and I will gladly help you out. For real.

My future urban foraging will likely include harvesting the apples from the bank-owned house next door. If you're afraid of the nettle tea, maybe I can convince you to try the cider this fall!

Hardcore lady skills!

This second house has proven to be a great opportunity for personal growth and learning.* The most recent of these skills is bobcat driving!

We have a list of project to complete before our rental inspection, and covering the dirt driveway with gravel is the most intimidating project. So we're tackling that first.

I found a neighbor with a truck to help me haul this sucker, and then got to work moving 6 yards (9 tons) of gravel.  And by "got to work," I mean "practiced driving back and forth very slowly" for a few minutes. I worked up to driving, then moving the bucket up and down. Followed by tilting the bucket. I'm not sure if it would have been comical or painful to watch; P assures me I was cute but he may be biased so I don't know if I can believe him.

I let P play with this fancy toy until he had to go to work, and then it was all me. It probably should have been about a 1 hour project, and took us about 3 hours. But now I have bobcat skills. And I met a bunch of neighbors (nothing like a lady in a bobcat to bring curious strangers over to chat). And the driveway was successfully covered with gravel.

Maybe driving a gas-powered skid steer with hydraulic lifts doesn't make me as hardcore as someone who drove a canastota wagon with a team of horses across uncharted prairie....but I think Laura would have traded her sodbusting mule for a bobcat in a heartbeat if she'd had the option!

*In other words, a major undertaking. Totally worth it, but a huge project.