Anita Vs. The Ivy:  Round 3

I hate ivy.  I take that back.  Partially.  I hate out of control ivy that tries to take over our yard. 

Round 1 of the this fight occurred during our first summer here.  My goal:  take out  the poison ivy first.  This, quite honestly, had to be my task because the dear husband is very allergic to it.  He even walks near it and he's broken out in blisters of various oozing nature.  Not a good look.  (As an aside, his first outbreak was at our engagement party!  It was funny at the time!)  I'm not allergic to it so far.  I say so far because according to some sites, people develop the reaction after a certain number of exposures.  15% of people are not allergic to poison ivy.  So I don't know if I'm one of the lucky 15% or I simply haven't been exposed enough times yet.  In either case, Round 1 went to Anita as I hacked off the ivy at its base and rounded up its little stubs to kill it dead.  HA!  Take that Poison Ivy!

Round 2 was last spring as we hacked the huge rope cords of regular ivy off of our trees.  Dave actually had to get an axe out to cut the ivy off at its base.  But now all our trees are ivy free and seem to be doing much better.  We certainly are doing much better.

Round 3 started yesterday.  We are preparing some of our beds for new landscaping, which we're going to do ourselves this time as opposed to hiring it out.  The scoop is that ivy doesn't responde all that well to Round Up.  Just spraying Round Up on it damages a few leaves, but this is hardy stuff.  What one needs to do is to pull it up by its roots in the late winter/early spring when the ground is still damp.  I cleared out half of the ivy yesterday.  It was amazing:  one yank would pull up 20 feet of vine.  I'd think that I'd finished one section and be yanking up vines in another, and I'd be pulling up a tendril sneaking back to the cleared spot.  This stuff is a virus.  I'm actually sore this morning from all the yanking and tugging to clear out what we did.  I think one more go at it will clear off most of the evil ivy.  We're going to leave a big patch by the side of the house for some easy ground cover, but we're going to tame the parts trying to make it out into the yard.

Decor Redux

My wonderful husband brought home some new software:  Total 3D Home.  It lets you set up a room complete with windows, doors, closets, etc all the the exact measurements of your specific rooms.  And then you can specify your furniture options and move them around the room and organize them.  It even lets you paint the rooms and stain the furniture  We have put the three rooms we're working on (master bedroom, family room and baby room) on the software and have measured all the furniture which has even some possibility of going in there.  After spending hours figuring out how to get our furniture into the new master bedroom, we think we came up with a reasonable solution which will not be crowded.  Our solution involved NOT putting a piece of furniture where it looked like it was obvious that a piece of furniture should go.  It would have taken me a long time and a lot of effort to have finally gotten out of that conceptual rut and realize the solution was in not doing what seemed obvious. 

We have also settled on a color for the room---ix-naying the monochromatic scheme for a one-half shade lighter version of the paint we currently have in the master bedroom.  Eastway Paints (a Benjamin Moore paints dealer) rocks!  If you're in the area--go there. 

They are predicting snow again for tomorrow.  We'll see.  I think something may happen, but I'm still skeptical of anything major happening.  We'll see.

9:35:30 AM