Return of the Street Trees

Over the summer we blogged about how the city cut down all of the street trees across from our house. Well, with the support of our local neighborhood association and our own tenacity, the city agreed to plant new trees "in the fall." After being reminded that fall was fully underway, the city actually did it. The dwarf pear trees pictured below were planted yesterday. Dwarf pears should not grow tall enought to interefere with the electrical wires. As an added bonus, the city planted a total of 9 trees, whereas there had been only 6 on that side of the street.

I'm glad the city followed through and I only hope I'm around to see the trees full-grown!

Strippin' is hard work.

No, no pictures of g-strings and pole-dancing in this post. Just pictures of the upstairs door casings. In our environmental furvor, we used all the salvage wood we could during the renovation. This resulted in us using 6 door casings (12 boards in total) which had been painted. Below is an example.

So, I pried-off one of the casings and sanded it down, stained it and poly'd it. HUGE pain in the butt, as the paint was applied to unfinished wood so it sank into the grain. Getting it out I gouged the board, but not so badly that I had to replace it. Still, hoping to save some time, I looked at the local architectural salvage yard for unpainted pieces with the same profile, but no luck. Then I called a refinisher for a quote on dip-stripping the pieces. At nearly $30 per board, I could probably get new ones milled for that price. So, I bought some stripper from the local hardware store and tried the second board using the stripper. While messy, it was much easier than sanding out all the paint. Below shows the refinished casings on both sides of the door.

It is exciting, as both casings shown above were painted light-blue as of last week. 2 down, 10 to go...