What home improvement work did you do today?

Trying to. I've got 5 acres, 3 that are currently just wild field, 2 that I mow. Turns out 20lbs of clover seed mixed with lime goes a long way.

 

Good to know
How much lime are you mixing in?

 

40lbs of lime to 10lbs of clover.

 

Our yard is mostly converted over from centipede lawn to various trees, shrubs, flowers. What grass is left, we've been over seeding in clover and microclover, and it's slowly beating the centipede (which is saying something). Green year-round, doesn't invade the flower beds, slower growing than winter grasses (I cut about every 3-4 weeks, April-Nov) and it feeds the bees, which helps our other plants pollinate.

 

Just told my wife, she's the expert...she said research it, as some clovers are annual, and some aren't evergreen.

 

Used OPN Seed’s bee lawn mix in our yard late ‘22. Can confirm: Whatever clover they use in that specific mix went mostly dormant over GA winter, but definitely stayed green and intact. It also runs, but hasn’t flowered much (at all, yet, 16mos in).

We once had an awesome established tall fescue yard. Then TruGreen aerated a couple adjacent homes, dragging in Armyworms from somewhere else. All five houses sharing borders with the houses that got aerated all lost their yards. I’ve started over 4x, and re-sodded twice and never been able to keep grass consistent since. First time dropped money on sod, had TruGreen come out for a couple of fertilizations and they burned the new sod up. They paid to replace it, though it took a lot of bitching to get there.

Sodded second time and it took but looked thin, despite all the right support from me. Ever since I seeded with the OPS fescue/clover mix, we’ve stayed green and healthy, I think the nitrogen fixing the clover is doing has helped the fescue we sodded a lot. Will see how we fare this summer before I count any eggs.

 

Holy shit shifty, what a battle...
We never treat with anything, mulch in the clippings. We are like the sanctuary in the neighborhood for insects and worms as everyone around us treats with all kinds of chemicals. Ours stays green all summer, with the help of shading from a couple gigantic trees. We are fortunate to not have the heat you do down there though.

Love how this looks every year.

 

Been going balls to the wall on demo of our breakfast nook expansion project. Getting rid of the office in favor of expanded eating area and knocking down a wall in the kitchen to really open things up. The whole house rests on the white beam in the pictures, so we're pretty free to move things around as we please. Plus getting rid of the lofted space and walls will bring in way more natural light, which should be a nice change to the area which is a little dark for our liking at the moment.

 

Before installing my shed, I utilized more backyard space by adding pavers to an unused gravel area. Kind of nice that we can now spread out more in this small yard. Only took 5 years and 2 kids lol

 

@Chip_Tundra ... Is that a New Braunfels smoker ya got there ?? I too am a pit master... I built my own reverse flow...

 

I wish. It's an OK Joe. Currently eyeing a Horizon 16".

 

Good looking workshop! Mine is almost set up the way I want it but will probably take a year to finish with all the other honey do things I have going on

 

May have to research that. I have centipede now and lime a few times a year.

 

Wow that's gonna be killa with more natural lighting, definitely keep the pictures of the progress.

 

I'll absolutely lay down dolomitic lime and use fertilizers. I don't use insect control or herbicides in a blanket fashion, having good, healthy soil is our aim. I manually/mechanically remove weeds that would otherwise get out of hand, and spot-treat the ones mechanical removal won't manage. I don't mess with glyphosate and other similar garbage.

This is going on summer #2 with the OPN bee lawn mix, over a tall fescue yard. I ultimately haven't seen flowering yet, but I mow once a week so that may have something to do with it. From what I understand, if the clover gets out of hand, you can lay a higher-nitrogen fertilizer down to scale it back, but at the moment, it seems to be helping the fescue way more than hurting it. (I'm running to the landscape supply place in an hour or two to fill in that empty spot along the fence with repeat-bloom rhodos, and a bay laurel).

All clippings get mulched back into the yard. All tree fodder gets the same treatment. Undyed hardwood mulch. Mechanical weeding. The yard is full of edibles, I try to keep at least 25% of our plants having some kinda function, and that's just the stuff outside the side yard stackstone garden beds. You should see our asparagus this year, I'll post some pics later.

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PS - dog tax, because it's always important to show off your home improvement handimals.

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Wow, love the new look!

 

I actually agree with you on all fronts. I picked up the adapter for a specific project I was working on, and like a couple other things now, it just sits in the "IT s***" pile as I wont need it. I have worked with Ubiquiti in the past on a professional level, as well as some of their plug and play options for home use. This is my first home server network and I am in love. The end goal is to have their access control and other offerings, but I am not in a hurry since Out o Stock and time are two competing factors. Next for me is to "finish" the camera runs and then wire management everything down low and up in the attic.

I will worry about the other stuff later.

 

Flooring is down. Going to do some touchups on the edge cuts before I start the walls.

 

Getting there...

 

Damn that's looking good... nice job...

 

Guilty. I've made a point of pruning back in the last couple years, but ... I'm swimming. A lot of it is highly functional too. I have a stack of Latitude 7480s I need to find new homes for right now. I've been donating everything I can out to local schools, teachers, computer labs, anything I can find. I try to go thru every 4-5 years and weed out anything that's 100% never going to get used.

The bolded part. Ugh. Especially with the cams. I have two spare 360° cams in my data closet right now because I got so damn sick of waiting for them to come back in stock. The stock alerts are never on-time, and don't always fire off when stock hits. I actually need to get one of those plopped into the garage ceiling soon. I ran some conduit back in mid-2022 that'll allow me to finish out all my LV runs (RG6, Cat6) but have yet to clean up my cabling and actually make the runs. Hoping to get to it now I'm on 'paid sabbatical of no return'.

 

Those latitudes prolly would make good techstreamers

 

I've got a few E7270 too, so smaller form factor, and a couple are touchscreen, would definitely make great candidates.

Only downside on any of these things is, this BS seemingly-arbitrary cutoff Microsoft put on Win11, at 8th gen Intel silicon. I have several 6th and 7th gen i7 systems that are far more beefy than 9th and 10th gen i3 and even i5 processors. All of these Dells I have are i7 quad core, 8 thread. All at least 16GB RAM, and I have a bunch of DIMMs on hand to make that 32. Them being locked into Win10 because they're all 7th gen Intel is BS. But to that point, if you only need it to run VirtualBox or VMware Player so you can load up Techstream, I guess it doesn't matter.

 

Did you get a kit or just going for it? I want a larger one at a property to use as storage and put the trailer in it

 

Most of the kits contain warped wood according to most reviews. I am building this one off of plans from shedking.

 

Love your setup! Oof,on the layoff. Hope you get something good come your way soon.

I might get in contact with you about setting up a unifi camera system for our house and as a baby monitor. I know it's possible,but I'm not 100% confident. I like the idea of keeping my camera and video on my own network/server and not on someone else's servers.

 

Cool thank you. I'm going to look into that. Has it been better easy? Do you do a lot of DIY stuff? I'm trying to gage the skill level needed as I've just starting trying to be more self sufficient and do more DIY stuff.

 

Make sure your foundation is stable. I had a prefab unit brought in on blocks and some of the blocks in the middle have settled and I got enough bounce in side that pisses me off. Need to find someone REALLY skinny to get up under and shim it up more.