DisKnit: Before and After

I was thinking while I took a nice hike with Curtis through Rock Creek Park in our great fall weather about how it is hard to work well with other people. I'm having some office drama lately but more noticeably is around my condo where I and few others have cajoled, forced, manipulated the other owners into a "improve the looks of the exterior and get rid of the rat holes" project. Living in a Condo means that all owners have a proportional vote based on the size of their unit. My unit happens to be the biggest, but I also just chose to be the driving force behind this project. It has not always been smooth. It involved lots of time getting permits, which was another kind of attempting to cooperate in DC where all things are not very logical. (The tree removal permit is issued in one place, but you can't pay for it there. Fortunately, there is a way to get it in the same place you pay for it, but the person who has to do it treated me like it was both a burden and a huge favor to do it.)

Yes, all you tree huggers out there, this project involved the removal of one large holly and the severe pruning of another. Since this Condo has not done well on maintenance, both trees were severely overgrown. So now the front of our place looks very sparse. But since it was impossible to get consensus on what to replace things with, the front will likely remain that way for a year.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to join in paying for the replacement of the back fence which was partially destroyed when an adjoining wall mysteriously fell. We could wait for that mystery to be solved by the owner who doesn't answer phone calls or just replace the fence. Unfortunately, my neighbors don't all want to trust the current contractor's quote. And I have refused (for now) to spend more of my personal time on the project getting other quotes.

I guess what it comes dwn is that it is hard to feel like you are doing more work than others, yet in most cases somebody has to do more work to get things done. I'm often one to be willing to do more work, but I do get whiny about it all.

Still, Curtis turned into a puppy play machine once he'd gone swimming in the creek and it was a lovely day, and I rather like our new sparse front yard. Here's some before and after pictures: