Stripped Down To the . . . Clear Cedar

I had previously stripped down the door, hoping that we could stain it and it just wasn't that nice.  I started stripping some trim and the siding and garage door and found somewhat of a surprise on the front porch -- what looks to be very good condition, clear, all heart cedar:

We had been trying to pick colors for the siding and had narrowed to four (the colors on each side of the door are the same and the background color is what is existing - the brown next to the window is the bare-ish cedar):

I liked one okay (the one on the line with the mailbox / second from the top) and Laura didn't fight enough to go get more colors to test, so we were about to go with it. We though the top one too brown, the second from bottom to grey and the bottom not as good as the one we were leaning towards.

As luck (?) would have it, my old sander broke while Margot and I were finishing her garden sign. So, I needed to get a new one.  The replacement was way better than the original (the plaid flannel shirt, however, did not come standard).

 So, I busted out the heat gun (update on that front in a coming post) and started scraping a lot of paint to the floor:

Digging through at least four layers: (taupe, peach, white, and beige) not counting the test layers I slathered on:
 

And, sanding down after scraping off 60 years of paint revealed the following:

I'm not a wood expert, but it looks like cedar and looks like pretty good quality stuff.  Of the dozen or so boards I've cleaned off so far, I've found one knot that is about the size of a dime.  The rest of it is pretty clear.

So, the current plan is to give this a light stain or maybe just a clear coat.  I cannot, however, figure out what we are going to do with the panels that flank the door.  They are crap plywood.

A window?  I cannot do that on both sides as the one on the right leads to the front hall closet.  Anyone?

Growing Some Grass

While my patch is small and there is still a long we to go -- weeds, intermittent balds patches, crab grass, etc. -- we have come a long way.

To start this season, this is what we were dealing with the backyard.  It was an eyesore:

We had tried to slit-seed last fall with some success.  It had been an absolute disaster last summer as we didn't have the sprinkler system turned on and I rarely was able to water.  So we had this.

I was in touch with Marc Wise at Greenwise in Evanston and he hooked me up with some supplies - seed, starter fertilizer, soil builder stuff and a word or two of encouragement.

I got things roughed up, top soil put down, seed and starter fertilizer in place and peat moss to cover it all up (not proud of using a non-renewable product like peat moss, but its what everyone does and it seemed to work). It rained twice, heavily, in late May (or early June?) and it ended up washing a ton of the work away and into the garden/flower beds, but as they say, "third time's a charm" and we got things started again (amazing how just rain and thunder greened things up tremendously in a couple of week!

A couple of weeks later -- with some bi-daily watering, we got to this:

Still patchy and thin, but getting there.  I overseeded again in mid-june.  Fertilized, and dropped some more peat moss.

For reference, there is last summer's "before" (prior to slit seeding):

After cutting the lawn last Friday, I snapped somewhat of an "after" shot here:

Still patchy here and there.  Way more weeds and crab grass, etc.  But we are getting there.