Remnants

So the apartment still isn’t what I’d call done. Oh the major stuff is—we have walls, appliances, heck we even have beautiful floors. We also have a punch list that’s two pages long. Not a single room is actually finished.

We spent some time yesterday knocking off some of those items and have more to do today. Kent worked repairing our living room windows (which were damaged by the nor’easter we had in March) while I tackled the patio. Since Kent is a redhead and might spontaneously combust in the sunshine, it seemed to be a good distribution of labor.

It’s been easy to overlook how damaged the patio was by all that water because it didn’t affect our living space, and I mostly just see it as I come and go to work. The patio is one of the major reasons we bought this apartment—we really wanted some outdoor space and that’s very hard to come by in Boston.

Our patio is mostly brick with a band of growing space along three of the four sides, and it’s also two levels. The upper level is closest to the alley, and the lower level is partially under the balcony of the apartment upstairs. We’d put in a lot of shade-loving ground cover and I must say the ivy appears to have loved being nearly drowned because it’s growing like crazy.

We’d also planted herbs and flowers in colorful pots that we could move to chase the sun around the patio. Some of the pots had broken or were so damaged I had to toss them and in all cases the soil in them ended up being packed in there like cement. So I had to use a trowel to break up the soil. We’ve got a storage chest we store those kinds of tools in—it’s about five feet long, stands not quite three feet high and is probably a couple of feet deep. When I opened the lid, I realized that it still had water in it from the flood. Everything in there was covered with silt and grime and the water line was obvious both on that and also on our grill (which we still need to check to see if it works).

I swept up a lot of sand from the lower level, so at some point we’ll need to redo those bricks. I look forward to the day when I don’t see any reminders of that stupid flood.