Presto, Change-o, Part 2

I believe I have previously mentioned that a neighbor of mine, a nationally known watercolorist, had torn down his house and was building a new one on the site. He and his wife have been living in a rental house nearby during construction. Today as I walked past the house, he was out in the street talking to a contractor.

I commented that the house was really shaping up nicely (my last walkthrough was a week or two ago), and he said, yes, they had just a week left to go.

As I looked again, surprised that it was so near completion, I was even more surprised to see that the front yard was covered with grass and a gravel driveway. I said, “Whoa! I just walked past here yesterday, and my head must really have been in the clouds because I didn’t even notice that the landscaping had been done.” (In fact, I later realized that what I had noticed yesterday was someone carrying a large triple sink into the house.)

He said, “Oh, it’s all been done in just the past two hours. It really makes a difference, doesn’t it?” Indeed.

The current trend in landscaping is certainly one of the most dramatic changes in home construction I’ve observed in my lifetime. I well recall a new house in our old neighborhood in Mobile. When construction was complete, a few shrubs were planted around the foundation, and grass plugs were dotted across the prospective “lawn.” The site was hilly, and the first good rain washed all the plugs down into the gutter. By this method it can take years to establish a lawn (and weeds get a firm foothold in the process).

Nowadays, landscapers arrive and roll out sod like carpet. By the time they are finished, the house looks as if it had been there forever, although sometimes even the sod isn’t permanent. A few years ago I was surprised to see landscapers removing the practically brand-new sod in front of the new house across the street from us and laying fresh sod. When I inquired, I learned that the owners had discovered that the original sod contained traces of some unwanted strain of grass that they considered a contaminant, and so they wanted it eradicated and replaced (presumably at no additional cost).

“Manufactured homes” are commonly denigrated, and even prefabricated house components haven’t entirely caught on yet, but readymade lawns are very much in fashion.

Open Windows

The past couple of weeks have been one of those brief idyllic periods in Fairhope when it is neither too cool nor too warm to leave the windows and doors open. It’s been so pleasant to have the fresh breezes and to hear the birds singing (as well as roofers hammering on a neighbor’s roof, lawn service workers using their gasoline-powered blowers, etc.), but now it seems to be over.

Today it’s hard to realize that it was only a couple of weekends ago that I felt it was finally safe to remove the winter blanket (heavy electric) and put on the summer one (lightweight cotton thermal), but Friday was quite warm, and yesterday it was so muggy that I finally threw in the towel and turned on the air conditioning. Even though I set the thermostat at 80°, the compressor immediately came on and cranked its little heart out all day.

Last night, when it was 86° in our bedroom and (nominally) in the low 70s outside, I tried opening a window, but there was no discernible difference in temperature, so I ended up closing it again and reluctantly nudging the thermostat down to 78°. Twelve hours later, the temperature in the bedroom is down to 84° (thank goodness for ceiling fans!).

We’ll probably have a cool snap sometime before summer really sets in (traditionally, the first weekend in May is chilly, but that didn’t happen this year), but I doubt that it will last long enough to make it practical to open the windows again; for that we’ll have to wait for those magical few weeks in the fall when conditions are “just right.”

One reason I hate closing the windows is that we lose the benefit of any breezes that may be going (though this becomes less and less of an issue as the season progresses). The conditioned air, though drier and thereby “cooler,” is stagnant; even with ceiling fans circulating in almost every room, it’s not the same as having cross-ventilation between windows.

We’ll adjust, though, and I have to say that when I came home from my walk today, dripping with sweat (79° out, with humidity to match), it was really pleasant to step inside and feel a noticeable chill!