Welcome to the Jungle

Having a nice yard is great for having friends over, kicking back, enjoying a drink and reading a book. To get there, though, requires a lot of maintenance and work. Our lot is about 10,000 sq ft, which is 1/4 acre. In Orange County, that's considered a very sizeable lot. Our previous home was on 6500 sq ft and the semi-weekly gardner took care of the majority of any exterior landscaping needs. Our current home however requires a lot more attention beyond what the garderners does.

The pool. This is our first pool home and the pool guy comes by once a week. The pool is solar heated (which really only extends the pool season by a few weeks on each end) but, during the week, we'll keep the pool covered with a solar cover as well. This really keeps the pool toasty and we can regularly get the pool into the low 90s which is really too warm to be refreshing. The pool guy is not very careful about rolling up the pool cover and always seemed to make a tangled mess. So we usually cover up the pool on Sunday night and remove the cover on Tuesday morning before leaving for work. It only takes a couple of minutes but it's an annoying choir when I'd rather be eating cheetos on the couch.

The koi pond. The pond is rather large with two waterfalls and looks wonderful at night when it's lit. We haven't figured out why but sometimes it gets a wicked algae bloom. The algae can get so thick that once a week during the summer, I'll have to spend half an hour scooping giant clumps of it out. In addition, about 4 months ago, it seems that a leak in the pond liner starting causing water loss. The water bill has jumped from $150 to $350! We've partially drained it twice to look for the source of the leak but been unsuccessful and will have to take most of it apart to find it once and for all.

The pool deck. I spend an hour every few weeks hosing down the deck. We live right off of busy street so I think we get more fine dust and dirt than most homes.

The bamboo. When we first moved in, we wanted to create a privacy screen from the neighbors and strategically planted several clumps of bamboo. We were careful to select a variety of bamboo that doesn't spread. However, this stuff seems to grow upward like a beanstalk and is truly too overgrown to look attractive. Some stalks are well over 20 feet and very bushy. I'll need to spend several hours a month to keep them in check.

The first summer, we planted morning glory to cover an ugly block wall. By the end of the summer, it had taken over the entire wall and then some. I spent many hours that summer hacking them back to prevent them from taking over the nearby trees and koi pond. We finally yanked them out entirely and they filled up about 6 large garden trashbags.

The pool water feature turned out well. I really thought that would turn out to be an eyesore because we didn't know what we were doing but it looks much better than the previous water feature which looked like a big lava rock.

And of course there was the fence and gate project which was a smashing success but robbed us of a weekend to build.

Today, I spent an hour pressure washing the patio furniture to prepare for summer use.

All this so that we can occasionally spend a few hours peacefully floating in the pool....ah. Next time, I think we'll get a townhome with a homeowners association that takes care of everything.

Total spent Friday:
$4 lunch at Viet takeout and the park
$0 leftovers for dinner and DVD

Total spent today:
$13 drycleaning
$155 couple of items of clothing, decorative home stuff at Marshalls
$104 education class through correspondence course (hopefully, this is the last course requirement that I'll need)
$40 dinner for 2 at The Cottage in Laguna Beach (saved $19 with Entertainment card)