Sprucin' Up

This is our house. The red brick with the bay window. It's 3 stories high like all the other houses and we live directly over a pharmacy (aka Apotheek).

We recently did a little sprucin' up around the house - got a new bedspread, planted some flowers in the yard, etc.

One of the things that's annoyed us since moving into our house is this unsightly rotting going on around the balcony on the top floor.

Yes, that green cross representing the pharmacy was annoying at first, but it goes off at night :)

Here's a close-up of the rot.

Naturally, we asked about this when we signed our lease and the owners even had someone come and have a look at it - supposedly to fix it. Well, 2+ years later, it is still there.

So we decided to do something.

As you can see from this photo, it would be fairly dangerous and completely insane to hang over the edge in an attempt to repair it.

It's on the 3rd floor of a busy city sidewalk so putting a 12 ft. ladder up there, replacing and painting the board wasn't going to happen. And I don't even want to think of the red tape and permits we'd have to obtain.

So we decided to just mask it.

Not bad, huh?

I think I'll add some additional ivy on the ends of each pot as I didn't think of that before and it will help even more in our "masking" effort.

These aren't spruce trees. I think they are probably some type of cedar, but you've never heard of "cedarin' up" and here's why . . .

The original English name, borrowed from Old French, for the country of Prussia was Pruce.

There's no such place as Prussia now, but at one time is was huge - Germany, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Denmark, Belgium and the Czech Republic were once part of Prussia.

So, anyway, in the 14th century, for whatever reason, Pruce became known as Spruce by English-speakers. Perhaps because the spruce tree was thought to have originated in Prussia/Pruce/Spruce.

The English imported goods from "Spruce" and apparently spruce leather was of especially high quality and spruce leather jackets became very fashionable. Therefore, spruce became a synonym for "neat and trim and fashionable". A couple of centuries later, spruce became a verb and for the past few centuries we've been "sprucin' up". Whew! There you have it. Bob's your uncle.

Home sweet home.