Capitol Hill Blue Forums Hot Topics & Breaking News The RoundTable Round Table Summer 2022

Nice Job!

Thanks. I really owe it to the spider though...his mere presence in life is what sparked and led to the discovery.

It was a Her, not a Him. Boy spiders are tiny weak little things, girl spiders are giant egg sacks. You probably did yourself a favor. They deposit eggs in your eves all autumn long which hatch out in the spring and disperse themselves around your property.

Are they long-leaf pines? You can make lovely baskets from those. It's what people used to do before the internet.

The needles are long. Around here, people put down redwood bark to keep the weeds out of their garden. These pine needles are acting as the same type of benefit.

When I expand the house (I'm in permit approval at the moment) my plan is to rototill the ground and rototill the needles and the gravel into the soil. The needles will add nutrients to the soil, and the rocks will disperse underground and allow air pockets and water to form around the rocks for aeration.

The needles are quite acidic and not particularly good for the soil unless you're growing blueberries or azaleas. Rototilling the surface roots around a pine tree will kill it.

Follow me for more garden tips...

Welp the pine tree is going away anyway, it’s right where one of the new boxes for the new addition is going. This area has naturally growing blackberry vines. The ones on my lot are going too.

OMG Karen just saw a Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale in Mt. Pleasant Wisconsin.
Single story, almost 5000 SF, and because Wright is who he is, the master bath was already laid out perfectly for wheelchair access simply due to the design.
And the kicker is, we can almost afford it, she's having a fit right now. (the good kind)
It's actually pretty cheap by Southern California standards.

Hmmmmm, I like Wisconsin, and it's only an hour away from where she grew up. (McHenry IL)
We might be moving to Wisconsin if she gets a wild hair up her butt.

That would be awesome Jeff! Make your wife's dream come true!!! YOLO!!! (You only live once)

My favorite FLW house: Fallingwater



Fallingwater is a house designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in the Laurel Highlands of southwest Pennsylvania, about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. It is built partly over a waterfall on Bear Run in the Mill Run section of Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania.

----Pfffttt, as I half expected, the offers are already inflating it way beyond the original asking price, which by the way was an astonishing 725 thousand. Hard to believe that anything FLW built could be less than a million and a half rock bottom. At this point I wager that FLW model in Mt. Pleasant will probably end up selling for well over 1.5 million.

It's the topsy turvy market effects of location for sure because no way is our modest 1996 home with HALF the square footage worth more than that gem in Wisconsin...it's only because home prices in El Lay are so ridiculously inflated. We saw a stunning home in Ensenada that was almost 6500 square feet...a damn MANSION, and it overlooked the harbor!
And it was selling for 350 thousand.

What would the two of us old farts do with that many square feet?
I dunno but for that price I could be a pretty happy expat if TSHTF up here in MAGA Land.

Yeah Fallingwater is amazing but just know, if you owned it, you'd be socked with monster maintenance costs because there are a couple of built in design flaws that keep rearing their head every few years, plus you own a landmark and you'd be required to keep everything up to FLW standards.

But yes, Fallingwater is beautiful...and a wee bit noisy!
Rumor is the original owner's wife liked to swim in the nude.