Why I Oughta...

If you walk by (or drive by) the playground outside of Whittier Elementary School on Grand Avenue, you'll see a bit of a construction site taking place on the playground area.  When I snapped this photo, there were concrete forms set up and a new perimeter curb was being poured and set.  They had also dug up quite a bit of earth in what looks like a perfectly-timed summer project for the school. I poked around a bit and it turns out that this is a major project that has taken five years to ideate and fund and now they're moving on to the construction phase.   From the Downers Grove District 58 site : Over the years, Whittier’s playground has received regular safety maintenance and minor changes, such as the removal of the teeter-totters. However, the playground itself is decades old and was built when Whittier’s enrollment was half its current size.  This discovery prompted the moms and Whittier PTA to launch a four-year planning and fundraising effort to upgrade Whitt

I took little Lizzie out for a walk around Barth Pond  after the kids were put* to bed ( *note...put doesn't mean 'staying' in bed.  And 'put' doesn't mean that Nat doesn't do MOST of the heavy lifting involved with wrestling them into submission each night... ) one evening recently and if not for the enormous piles of goose turds everywhere, it was quite lovely.  There were other folks walking, a few people down at the water's edge with fishing poles and some families on the playground.  The weather couldn't have been better.  The sun was about to set and the water reflected a beautiful blue from the sky.   The summer heat hasn't hit yet, so most everything was green and not yet yellowed. Turns out, the path around the pond is .45 miles, according to a post marker, so a few laps around gets a mile in for me and the dog. With the days being so long right now, this is a nice little way to end the day and wind down.  Who knows?  Maybe we&

About a month ago, I showed the last pictures of our #NewOldFarmhouse where we were having our driveway poured out front.  More recently, the crew moved on to the landscaping and that includes the underground routing of drain pipes.  We're putting the downspouts and the sump pump drain into pipes underground.  You can see one of the big runs in the image above.  They're taking some of the pipes and running them towards a dry well and others...they're running into the yard and installing some 'pop ups' and then letting the grading of the property take over.   I took some photos of the drywells (yes...there's more than one) that we put in underground and I'll post the details of those over time.  It seemed that we had a few choices:  put in the drywells or include a water garden - like the one that the City of Elmhurst recently installed as a demonstration .   From a landscaping perspective, I had a really unique experience.  The subcontracto

More tree posts!  Yeah...just what you were hoping for, right?  Another post about the tree situation at our new place in Downers, but this one is a bit special.  It's because the kids and I went out and picked out this tree just for Natalie.  She wanted a Willow, so we went hunting at Menards and came up with this interesting one:  a Corkscrew Willow.  Salix matsudano 'Tortuosa'. As a refresher, there's been a bunch of new trees that we're adding/added to the backyard. We picked up a Dawn Redwood .  And planted it.   I posted about the north side of our backyard and how we're going to fill it in.   I am trying my hand at the art of espalier.   With two Linden trees .   And, after being inspired by the Cherry Blossoms in Tokyo, I picked up a flowering Cherry tree . And now add this Willow to the mix.  We picked it up at Menards and it was priced to sell. Listen...I know the reputation of willows.  Dirty, filthy trees.  That don't last long.

Earlier this Spring, I spent time in Tokyo where in addition to heading to Tokyo Disneyland and checking out the fish market, we were also there during the peak Cherry Blossom season.  I wrote about the trees here on the blog back in April .  I've been enamored with the trees ever since.  And trees have been on my mind lately as we continue to think about our yard.  I'm trying to get an early start on trees, because unlike sod or even flowers or bushes, trees take much longer to mature to the point to where they've grown into their size.  I've already posted about how we picked up a Dawn Redwood tree and planted it.   I also posted about the space we're going to fill in with either flowering pear trees or perhaps European Hornbeams along our northside.  And, of course, there's the Linden trees that I'm going to try to espalier .   (At what point, can we start calling it an arboretum??) For Mother's Day, I also picked up Nat a Japanese flowering

A few weekends back I stopped at a few Estate Sales both in Elmhurst and in Downers Grove including one at this really neat house that was built in the early 1910's for some wealthy family as their 'country house' - at least that's what the folks running the sale said.   Here's the property listing of the house that, unfortunately, I'm thinking someone will buy for the land and tear the place down.  Like a lot of older houses, the layout isn't what works for families today, but the land?  My gawd.  Not just a lot of it.  But lots of mature trees, different elevations.  Really, really great. Inside the house, there were lots of treasures, but just one came home with me:  this brass fox 'letter rack'.  Hard to tell from this angle/photo, but between the fox and the fence is a gap that allows you to stand up/hold mail/cards.  Check out t his Etsy listing that has some photos of a similar piece that show how envelopes stand up in there.  Kinda coo

Above is a photo of the northern side of our new lot in our backyard that is almost immediately outside our backdoor.  That fence, it turns out, belongs to our neighbor to the north, but is installed incorrectly (with the 'good side' facing his side and a bit too tall), so things are changing, I believe.  We've heard from our builder that the fence might be coming down and getting readjusted.  But, we hope it isn't going away.  That's because it is shielding their driveway - which is currently occupied by a few project cars and some other larger items. We are investigating a fence for ourselves (btw, this would be our second fence. Here's a post from way back in 2011 when I was staining our newly installed fence at our old place .) , but because of the way the lot is graded, this part of the property is a lot lower than the middle part, where our house is located.  That means that it is really easy to basically see 'over' the current fence.  And if

Over the weekend, I stopped into the Aurelio's takeout location in Downtown Downers Grove while I waited for the Babe to emerge from the basement setting for a birthday party at the Tivoli Lanes right next door.   When I was there, I came across three things:  First was this art glass piece above that is right when you open the front door.  Hadn't noticed it before, but I really like it and it seems like this belongs in one of their *real* restaurants.  And, by 'real', I mean a sitdown place.  This one in Downers is just a takeout joint.  Sure, they have 3 tables and sell (sadly) slices, but it isn't a restaurant, at least to me.  (Also, the fact that they are selling pie-shaped slices is a bummer, right?  I mean...Aurelio's is a tavern-cut pie by nature.  I get that they're trying to sell slices, but being a pizza crazy person, I don't like to see the bastardization of a tavern-cut pie.   Why not 'big squares'?) Anyway, on to the second and

Over the weekend, I posted this photo of a handful of 'survivor' ferns in our new backyard and mentioned that they deserved a shot at being transplanted because they're clearly hearty souls.  Having been able to thrive without anyone tending to them in years means they'll likely be easy to care for, right?  That's what I'm going to assume.   Plus the experience I've had with these ferns before make me love them. I ended up bringing out the spade shovel and dug up a few clumps of them ahead of the landscaper coming out to grade the backyard.  I ended up sticking them in with a bunch of other salvaged plants in the rear of the yard.  Here, in the photo below, you'll see them mixed in amongst the hostas that I took from the front yard as well as a few of the variegated hostas that we picked out of our old neighbor's compost bin in the back. I'm thinking that this isn't likely their end destination (my current thought is to put these on

The work over at our #NewOldFarmhouse has begun to shift to include the outdoors areas as the project continues to come together.  That means hard surfaces, grass and landscaping.  In the back, we're going to tend to a good chunk of the yard, but there is going to be the back portion that we won't be getting to out of the gate.  That means, we'll be leaving it in it's natural state for now. The whole thing is kind of in it's 'natural state' for now, meaning there are clumps of weeds and trees and ground covering scattered all over the place.  The landscape crew that is coming in to straighten things out will be clearing some of this stuff out.  But, check out the photo above.  See what is in those red circles?  That's right?!?   Ostrich Ferns.  My favorite .  I've covered them extensively including this post where the University of Illinois Master Gardener confirmed the species and I even transplanted a good set of them out in Naperville to be

It was ten-plus days ago that I posted a photo of the framers building out our new place with walls and ceilings and such .  Welp, they've wrapped up their portion of the project and moved on to other jobs leaving behind something that *actually* looks like a house.  Like...a real, live house.  You can still basically 'see' right through it as there's nothing in any of the walls and there's no windows or doors, but the basic shapes of the place we've been thinking about, dreaming about, hoping about for the past two years is there to take in, in it's full glory.  Or...some portion of it's glory. We've been able to head over there on the weekends and peek in on the progress.  Nat gets there more often than I do, because she has the hard job of getting our kids around all day, everyday, so she finds herself in the neighborhood more than I do. When I was there recently, I peered out back and saw this machine in the backyard and noticed the trenc

Progress, progress, progress at our new place.  Just ten days ago, I posted about the incredible installation of our water main (under a huge tree!) and now we're already moving on to framing of the house.  And by the time you all read this post, there will be even more done! The crew is busy putting up the deck, walls and ceilings and now the place is starting to really FEEL like a house.  It was an abstract idea for a long time, but now that you can walk into each of the rooms and actually BE there?  It's totally real and it is totally crazy.   Almost hard to convince myself that this project involves us and our family.  We're not just watching something happen.  We're watching OUR something happen! And...crazy?  Yeah, crazy like the weight of two years of wandering around as a family is coming off of our shoulders.  Sure, there's a TON more time to go, but suddenly, we have a place.  We have a shared goal.  We have a home.  It is just made out of lumber,

Well...we've got a plan. After more than a year of moving out our our home and after a few false starts, we're about to start on the process that will end with us with a place to call our own.  Weather permitting, of course.

We found ourselves in Downtown Downers Grove today and scattered across Main Street were a bunch of ice sculptures.   Over on Chicago Parent Magazine, they have a listing for the event that spans both Saturday and Sunday.  It was cold this weekend and that was GREAT for this things. This 'snowflake' one was outside of Ballydoyle's on the south side of the tracks. Frankfort does this and I think it is a nice way to add some flair to the shopping district during the cold, dreary post-Christmas months.  We missed the demo, but I bet the kids would have loved seeing that in all of it's chainsaw-shaving-glory.