What's in a Name?

A Greenbriar by any other name would be a Devil's Thorn.

We've been fighting this thing that we called "Thorny Vine" for the entire 6 years we've owned the property that we're going to build on. This stuff is all tangled up, along with wisteria and honeysuckle vines, in the low-voltage lines running on the utility poles, as well as growing in the gingers and in the fence lines.

It is a vicious beast, wiry, twining in and out of the chain link fence, attaching itself with tendrils and  pushing its way between wooden fence slats, popping up every few inches between the chain link and wooden privacy fences, where you can't dig it out or cut it completely down to the ground. (Although, one kind of wonders what the point of digging it up is, since it is nearly impossible to dig all of it up - and miss any part of the root and it will happily send up numerous new shoots all along it.)

It had gotten completely out of hand once again, so this past weekend, we worked on pulling it down from the lines, cutting it out of the fence lines, and digging it up where we could. Again.

By the time we finished Saturday evening, Roy's arms looked like he'd stuck both of them in a gunny sack with a couple of cats. In other words...baaaaaad. We showered and pretty much slathered antibiotic ointment on his two arms as if it were body lotion. His arms had some long scratches, some short scratches, and a whole lot of vicious-looking deeply-gouged pin-pricks. Some he couldn't even see were across his tri-ceps and elbows.

(I lucked out this time, only hooking a thorn at my heel that I had some difficulty in dislodging. I had the substantially safer job of cutting up the vines into small, foot-long-ish pieces to put in the trash can for automated pick-up.)

On Sunday, at Home Depot, we ran into Noreen, a former colleague of Shelly's from her employment days at Rice. Noreen is a native plant expert among many other things, and when we showed her Roy's arms, her first reaction was "what cat did you get in a fight with?!?!?" When we described Thorny Vine to her, she exclaimed, "oh, you're talking about greenbriar! I hate that stuff! It might be a native, but oooh, it's a miserable plant!"

And therein lies the story behind where the street name of Greenbriar comes from -  it's named after a native plant, vicious in its tenacity. (For those of you who don't live in the Houston area, Greenbriar is a the name of at least two local streets, one that runs along the west side of Rice University and another that is out in the Sugar Land-Missouri City area.)

Amusingly, greenbriar is, of course, a wild edible. We don't intend to try it any time soon.  (Roy poisoned them, again, so we don't recommend you try ours, either.)

On the website, Dave's Garden, a number of folks talk about their personal experiences with greenbriar:

• "A thorny woody climber that must be a close relative of razor wire."
• "I live in the Piney Woods area of Texas, near Woodville. I, too, will probably spend the rest of my life trying to dig the "sticker taters" out of my yard. I hate that blankety-blank vine! I've dug into huge colonies and a few huge individuals, as big as a man's arm."
• "The first time I encountered this plant was several years ago in the Florida Keys. It was like vinyl coated wire with needle-sharp thorns. I had never seen it before, and a neighbor called it "Devil's Bit"."
• "This thing feels like pure evil, it's freaking me out. The vines are super thorny and painful even when they're the diameter of a sewing needle, and the roots have hard spindly curved growths that look very much like claws digging into the earth."

You probably get the point (ha-ha) by now, even if you've never had the misfortune of experiencing greenbriar first hand. 

Bag of pine needles, 1, Shelly, 0

As a college classmate said of his parents to Roy once, "they had a house to live in and a house for junk".


We, unfortunately, resemble that remark. We are, at least, down to just two houses and two two-car garages now. (From July 2010-July 2014, we also had a 10x15 ft climate-controlled storage unit a couple miles away....)

As you can see from the pictures, there is miscellaneous lumber stored on shelves and in the rafters, Elfa shelving, lawn chairs, a dis-assembled 1/2-inch copper pipe trellis/cage we built, etc. You name it, and there was probably some of it in the garage at 5127. 

This past holiday weekend, we worked most of Saturday on sorting through the garage so that it can ultimately be torn down. We shredded the nice bags of leaves down into just a couple bags (good for gardening and our vermiculture bins), sorted things into move to other house and apply (various soil amendments — a whole mini-van's worth!), trash, recycle, or give to Habitat for Humanity's ReStore donation center. Good work was accomplished, and I should have had us quit while we were ahead.

But ... I could see either a bag of leaves or, most likely, pine needles hiding on the floor in the far back corner, behind the decorative door sitting up on bricks (Roy is immediately in front of that door in the picture to the left) and the old utility shelves (on the right wall), and the bikes hanging from the joists (to the left of Roy). And I wanted that bag out of there, and stored with the other bags of pine needles or shredded leaves, wherever it belonged.

Thus began my tug-of-war with that bag, with my arm extended as far as I can reach, while I'm standing side-wise between the door and the shelves, and I'm trying not to knock the door over, which could start a whole lot of bad (see above pictures for different angles of lots of stuff I can knock over if I'm not careful).

Roy pretty quickly said to leave the bag alone, but I was playing at being a stubborn Chicken that day, and I gave it one tug too many. The door wobbled, I grabbed it, but didn't let go of the bag... and in the process, dislodged a piece of the 1/2-inch copper pipe cage that we had built that was up on a shelf above my head and above that bag.

Said piece of copper pipe cage is flung down onto my fully outstretched forearm, with one of the rough-cut ends smacking into that fully-engaged muscle. To say it hurt, well, it's been a long time since something hurt so bad that I couldn't actually say anything. I was stunned. It immediately began to swell, and we can see the complete imprint of the end of the pipe. We figure we are now finished for the day, but we still have to pick up everything from the driveway and put it away, then go home and get showered. As a reward for not screaming bloody murder, I wanted to try out the new ice cream shop in the shopping strip around the corner (La Monarcha for anyone in the 'hood). That's a nice scoop of pistachio ice cream I have there, by the way. We recommend the place (next to Peru Gourmet).

I iced my arm, and iced it some more, taking ibuprofen along the way. All told, I wound up icing it on and off for 3 nights because of pain and swelling. Tuesday night, I braced that wrist, as my arm had throbbed mercilessly all afternoon at work. (Flex your wrist toward your arm and/or type, and you'll see quickly which muscle I'm talking about.)

It looks pretty good today (Wednesday) - the swelling is almost completely gone and I can physically brush across the injury with my fingers and not flinch. Once the scab finally goes away, I'll put Mederma on it for the next 6 weeks or so, since I'm not really excited about having a perfect half-pipe scar on my forearm.

Have I learned my lesson? Oh, probably not. But I will be more cautious for a while, at least.

Raking in the Signups (and How Arcbazar works)

On Arcbazar, a designer is awarded points for signing up for a competition, submitting an entry, and the receiving one of the top 3 places (and perhaps honorable mentions). They lose points if they sign up and do not submit. Plus there is the prize money (our stated award pot), split 60% for 1st place, 30% for 2nd, and 10% for 3rd.

We learned in our first experience with Arcbazar in 2013 that a lot more designers will sign up than will submit, so we're not overly excited (ok, so yes we are) that at only 4 days in, we have 12 official sign-ups and an additional 12 folks who have saved our competition. The 12 "savers" may choose to sign up and submit an entry towards the end of the contest or they may just want to watch this play out.

Not only do you, the client, upload surveys and other measurements, you also upload a specification document(s). We tried to make ours as loose as we could, having learned from our first contest that giving the designers as much leeway as you can will yield you more varied results that might offer you very different and creative solutions.

You can also upload images of styles or rooms you like, so that the designer can get a better feel for what will visually appeal to you and craft their entry to draw you to their submission.

Another neat aspect of Arcbazar is the Wall, where the designers (architects and other designer types) ask you questions that either you neglected to address in your specification or they want further guidance. This Wall is public for all of the designers (and everyone else on Arcbazar) to see during the contest.

So far, we have 3 wall questions: one about materials for the exterior and roof, the next about how we envision the pool room (natatorium) interacting with the outdoors, and the third was just crazy (is there a rear set-back line). The first two were great questions, because we didn't really address them in the spec, other than 51% brick or stone (required by deed restrictions). The reason the third question is crazy is if you have ever seen that property, you know just how deep it is - 160 ft on the east and 186 feet on the west. No way should any building structure get anywhere near the rear line!

The breakdown of sign-ups is all over the world so far: Egypt, India, Montenegro, Nigeria, Philippines, Romania, and the USA. Watchers are in Egypt, India, Italy,  Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, and the USA.

A New Day Finally Dawns in Our Remodel Saga

The past 2.5 years have been quite the ride for our family. We moved into the remodeled 5206 on May 17, 2014, exactly 20 years to the day after we purchased it as our first home in 1994. We have loved living in the home we always knew it had the potential to be.

It's comfortable, and we've been happy here, but, it doesn't have the Endless Pool.

In June 2015, we celebrated our 25th anniversary with a trip to Alaska, followed within weeks by Roy's layoff from Bluware in July after more than 25 years with them. That fall, we both found new jobs. Roy has loved his, I have hated mine.

In August 2016, with my job again in limbo, we finally decided to just sell 5127 (the 1/3 acre property) as-is and walk away. The foundation of 5127 is very bad and the structures both sit below the surrounding grade on all sides (imagine living in the middle of a pond when it rains hard - where the water has no path to drain as it is in a bowl!). Even the garage takes on water.

However, the market isn't really moving any homes at all right now, and we didn't try very hard to sell....

After some discussion over the Christmas holidays, we decided to resurrect our idea of building a new home at 5127. It has way more land than we currently have - 75% more, to be exact. That allows us ample room for additional fruit trees and larger gardens (both flower and vegetable) as well as a comfortable space for an Endless Pool, and we can have some fun with the home's design.

5127 is an opportunity that is unlikely to come our way again given the scarcity of parcels of land that size in our area. The 1/3 acre to the east of 5127 has never gone on the market in 60 years, as the same family has owned it the entire time. The 1/3 acre to the west has changed hands once.

Which brings you up to current day, February 2017, where we just put the design for our new, two-story home with natatorium up for competition on Arcbazar. We used the crowd-sourcing architecture design website back in 2013 for the potential remodel of 5127 and had fun with it - our previous competition is how we learned about the cat doors that read their microchips, allowing only them into the house and not every cat and possum in the area to come inside. We're hoping for some similar fun and inspiration this time around.

You can watch the 4-week competition as it evolves, but you do have to either sign up for a free Arcbazar account or login via Facebook or LinkedIn.

This is our competition page at Arcbazar: Two-story home with Natatorium in Houston, Texas. 

So buckle your seat-belts, everyone, we're in for a ride for the next couple of years. Once this competition for a design ends, we will likely have to modify the design elements somewhat and take it to an architect/designer locally for all of the actual blueprints needed to build - structural, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, product selection, etc.

We've been through the electrical in detail on 5206, so we're comfortable there, plus the plumbing and HVAC spec will largely be a familiar process to us as well. Whoever we select as the architect in Houston will likely find us with firm opinions on where things get placed-and what those things are. The structural is the biggest unknown, as that plat needs to have its grade corrected and a firm foundation created. We will be heavily relying on experts there.

If you have personal experience with a custom builder in Houston, let us know. There's a custom home going up just two blocks away and we liked our previous builder for 5206. With a project this size, we're definitely putting it out for several bids.