So, here are some of the things that have been growing (or rather, overgrowing) in the side and back yard. The fennel is nearly 5 feet tall already and a big storm snapped the top 2 feet of the peas over. The yellow pear tomatoes have tons of unripen fruit on them. I think the golden beets will be ready to harvest in a week or two. The lettuce has bolted (because of a week of 90+ degree weather).

Spent the Day Ripping up the Rooftop Deck

Well, the roofers are coming tomorrow to start work on our complex. We are supposed to remove our deck and everything on the rooftop at least 48 hours before they are scheduled to begin working on our unit. They're scheduled to begin on Thursday the 7th, so we have to be cleared off by Tuesday the 5th.

We spent the entire day up on the rooftop pulling up the 300+ square feet of deck, powerwashing it, cleaning off the membrane, taking planters down to the kitchen deck and then moving the deck we're keeping into our 4th floor penthouse and cutting up the part of the deck we're throwing away.

PHOTO: cutting up the old 10'x10' section of deck into 5' sections for the garbage.


It was a PAIN! We started around 9:30 this morning and finished with the deck around 5:30 pm just as a torrential rain started to pour.

At 10 am we had a showing of our place which I had to do myself since our realtor never heard back from the buyer's realtor so she assumed they weren't confirmed. Well, they showed up at 10, so we got them to give us 20 minutes to get the place ready for a showing.

PHOTO: lifting up, cutting and cleaning the sections of the deck we're keeping


I hate the home selling process. It's so nerve wrecking! And now with this roof construction it really throws a wrench in our selling plans.

We don't want to do any showings until the construction on our section of the roof is done and we can re-lay the deck. Right now we have about 200 square feet of cedar decking inside our 4th floor penthouse along with 2 Adirondack chairs.

We wound up having to take all our furniture from the penthouse and repositioning it to other rooms throughout the house so we could make room for all the decking. So now the rest of the house looks more cramped because of the extra furniture here and there.

PHOTO:powerwashing the deck before storing it in our 4th floor penthouse


We also had to bring 3 cedar planters with 4 curly willows and 1 dogwood down from the roof to the kitchen deck. Our kitchen deck is crazy busy with plants right now.

The willow was an absolute pain to try to dig up (we had to dig the trees and bush out of the planters so that we could carry them down - too heavy if left in planters). I think it took me a good hour to just to dig the willows out of the 2 planters.


So now we're exhausted and sunburned and ready for some carry-out from Penny's Noodle Shop in Wicker Park!

So Now We're Up To Speed...

Well, fast forward through the fall and winter and that brings us to this year - 2007. This is our last year living in the City of Chicago. We put the townhouse up for sale. We've started looking for a new house for our growing family. Although we love the city and our current home, we really look forward to having a house surrounded with trees and flowers.

It will be nice to wake up and see a blue jay or a cardinal outside. Right now pretty much all we see are pigeons, a resident pair of doves, and the lone robin that visits our deck.

We aren't planting up the roof deck this year because we plan to move sometime in the next few months. We emptied out the two large cedar planters and took down the lattice screens. The remaining 3 planters (which hold dogwood and curly willows) are coming down this week and being transferred to one of our parent's yards for the time being along with the Adirondack chairs.

Our association has decided to rip the roof off the entire complex and re-do the pitch since the water hasn't been draining off properly over some of the units. Therefore, we have to dismantle the roof deck and transfer it to a neighbor's roof while they work on our section in 2 weeks. That is something we're not looking forward to.

It should take 4 days for the workers to rip off the roof membrane, change the pitch, add insulation and re-roof our section. They're also taking the AC off and recharging the compressors. So no AC (with a baby in the house) for a few days! Plus they have to remove our penthouse doors & raise them to adjust for the new pitch. This is not going to be fun (especially since our house is on the market in the midst of this construction).

We did set up a bunch of containers on the kitchen deck. This year we picked up some great herbs at the Oak Park Conservatory Herb and Flowering Plant Sale. Among those plants is a striking red and gold lantana, two varieties of lavender, thyme and sage. We've got a mix of colors going this year - no particular theme - purples, yellows, reds, pinks, and whites. In that mix are:

• yellow plume celosia
• silver dust dusty miller
• lantana (shrub verbena) in Bandanna Red and Peach Sunrise varieties
• lobelia
• heavenly blue morning glory
• cleome (spider flower) in pink and white varieties
• verbena in white, pink, red and purple
• violas in purple and yellow
• ornamental cabbage in lime green and purple veined
• lavender in Provence and Goodwin Creek varieties
• basil
• thyme
• Greek oregano
• parsley
• black sweet potato vine
• rosemary
• dill
• sage
• cherry tomatoes
• poblano peppers
• jalapeno peppers
• common chives
• garlic chives
• spike plant
• jasmine
• hydrangea
• cubanelle peppers
• peas

We're still going to plant up a few more planters to fill in the sides of the deck. Perhaps some mints, licorice, calibrachoa, angel wings and geraniums to add summer long blooms.

Memories of our Second Summer - Building up the Roof Deck!

We spent our 2nd summer here building up the roof deck. What was once around 80 square foot of deck on the roof was expanded to a little over 300 square feet that summer. We built an expansion of decking, 5 cedar planters and cedar lattice screens to help ease the wind blasts on the roof.

This is the original part of the rooftop deck. We added the lattice screen, cedar planters, bench and chimenia this summer.











This is the part of the deck that we added on, it's over 30 feet long along our 4th floor penthouse room.





We planted some flowering red dogwood, hardy hydrangea and curly willow in the planters along the east wall. The willow was actually taken from fresh cuttings which were rooted in water over a period of a few weeks.

The planters along the north wall were planted up with coreopsis, babies breath, cosmos, morning glory, sweet peas, regular (eating) peas, eggplant, regular and cherry tomatoes, onions and even a grape vine. The northwest section of the rooftop deck is what we refered to as the "vegetable garden" since that's where we concentrated all the veggies for maximum sun exposure.

We built 2 cedar Adirondack chairs for the roof deck. (Unfortunately a few crazy hail storms over the past 2 years have left their mark on the chairs in the form of hundreds of tiny round dents). Once we move and have time we plan to sand the chairs back down to the wood and refinish them.

Memories of Our Second Summer - the Kitchen Deck

Well, we bought a nice wooden patio set for the deck during our second summer here. It's served us well during all our bbq's and outdoor parties.

The flowers we planted up this year were in shades of blue, purple, orange, yellow and white. Among the plants we planted were: orange African daisies, calendula, sweet alyssum, lobelia, marigold, hydrangea, morning glory, pansies, violas, licorice and coleus. Herbs that graced our table were rosemary, basil, chives, mint, thyme oregano, parsley and green onions.

Everything grew really nicely until around the end of July when we were hit with a few weeks of extreme heat.