Flurries

Pittsburgh is understood best in the winter. The weather suits its gritty moodiness and gives the residents a reason to stay inside, to complain and to be generally crabby. The winter of 2008-09 was endless. I had resigned myself to drawing and planning for the house and Jack slowed his work there to a bare minimum.

We were still at odds on priorities for move in. There had been no resolution in regard to disposal of trash and we had the added challenge of needing a licensed electrician to ok the main line in so that we could have power. It seemed any suggestion I made was met with criticism and I began to doubt I was capable of contributing to such a big project. This was compounded by the doubts of all our family and friends who looked at us as if we were crazy when we took them on our house tour.  

That spring I did everything I could to stay out of Mercy Haus. I focused on the garden and nurtured our plants. Jack was taken with Bill Mollison and Sepp Holzer and so we tried to design what I hoped to be a carefree permaculture grazing garden. That first year I am certain we spend more money on the garden and the plants than we did on the house itself. 

Despite all the work I did in the yard we were getting turned in by the neighbors for the tall grass. See pattern 172 “Garden Growing Wild” This was to be expected since this was one of the only ways they had of complaining about a vacant house, and we had yet to assure them that we were not going to flip the property, that we wanted to improve the building and the lot and be good neighbors.  

 Fence before Summer 2008 & after Summer 2013 (four years old)

That being said, we decided to rebuild build our fence. I had gotten a bunch of reused fencing from work and we began the task of digging post holes by hand. Renting a post digger would have been the smart thing to do, but we were too stubborn and set off to work with what we had. This took us weeks, but the end result was quite nice, and 4 years later there is not much repair that needs to happen. We flipped the pickets on their sides so that we could match the contours of the hill, and that from the street it looks friendly and cared for.