Category: Our Projects

The 4 Month Table

Due to some insane and ridiculous series of events, it took over 4 months to transform this table.  It sat in the garage in between phases and taunted me, louder and louder with each passing month….”Finish me…Finish me…FINISH ME!”

OK!!

Here’s how I found it…$4.00 at the Goodwill Outlet.

I didn’t take enough before pictures, but the top is MDF and was gouged, and even burned in a few places….I think this table’s owners had anger issues….

So the CC filled all those places with epoxy….

sand down the epoxy and old paint….

Then sandblasted the metal base when we were blasting the outdoor furniture.

I never showed you one of the tricks we find necessary when sandblasting…sieving the sand…..

We pour the sand through a window screen to catch the coarser bits that clog up the nozzle of the blasting attachment.  It really makes all the difference!

See?  That stuff will mess you up.

Much better.

Then, prime, paint, sand, paint again…nothing exciting…just plain white.  Sorry for the crappy photos…this room is way dark with difficult angles away from the window and I had no time for styling….then again, I never do…I’m a renovator first.

Bamboozled with Slats on Mother’s Day

I feel like I can say with reasonable confidence that my fabulous Mother’s Day would be most people’s idea of hell.  It was a beautiful day…a bit cooler than usual and I decided to go bushwacking….or bamboowacking to be more precise.

I can’t plant anything new because of water restrictions (no irrigation allowed), so it’s a great time to tend to what you have.  There is a jungle of bamboo just beyond the new retaining walls and it looks as though no one has taken any notice of it in the 33 years since it was planted.

After our 16 inches of rain, I started seeing tons of new culms appear and knew these new volunteers needed attention.  They couldn’t thrive if I didn’t enter the jungle and clear out all the dead wood and weeds competing for water and nutrients.  With the ground still so soft and moist, it is the perfect time to pull weeds and weed trees by the roots.  Garden dorks know how incredibly satisfying this can be.

There’s a lot more dead than alive in there…..

So there’s my jungle…I have a saw and I know how to use it.

I salvaged quite a few good canes for future use…maybe treehouse or compost pile?  Either way, I had to save them for something.  The rest….to the curb….

I knew it had to be in here somewhere since I always saw them fly into the jungle…..

A cardinal nest with an egg…I was very careful to leave it undisturbed…I can get the dead canes supporting the nest later after the egg has hatched.

Now these new culms have air circulating around them, and after I feed and mulch them, I think they will be beautiful.  For the first time, we can walk back there and I think the back end of the treehouse will put you right into the “bamboo forest” with a new path leading to the trail.

So what made the cuts, scrapes and getting slapped in the face by bamboo so fun? I had company….The Minors actually HELPED me by dragging giant bamboo canes down to the road for a little while, or would hang out playing on the walls and talking to me.  I LOVE it when we are all outside together.  The CC was with us too working on his own project…..

Remember the old lattice under the front deck/entrance?

Looky….

The CC ripped some of our old salvaged deck boards straight down the middle and attached them with some stainless steel screws we had leftover from the mailbox project.  We have plenty of deck stain on hand, which brings the total cost of this wall to a whopping $0!!!

That’s what I call an amazing (and frugal) Mother’s Day.

All Decked Out

…and nowhere to go.

They built the back deck at the same time as the wood front steps, but I never showed you the back because I wanted to get it all stained and stylin’ for ya.  I honestly don’t know when that is going to happen…so…there.

It rains every weekend that I try to rent the pressure washer to clean the old sections of deck.  When it’s dry, the oak tassels keep falling into the stain…freaking annoying.  I managed to get those front steps stained by some miracle reprieve in nature…and they aren’t even finished…just good enough for a distance photo!

Here’s where we are….or were, and are, this week.

This was taken during inspection….that corner where the hose is?  My nemesis.  We’ve been grading that with mud etc.. to keep water from pooling there, despite the french drains.  Today’s downpour showed us we were FINALLY successful.  WAH freakin’ HOO!  I was hoping for Madonna-esque guns after all that digging…didn’t happen, so I’ll settle for draining water.

There was just a small deck outside the living room, with plenty of mud on either side of it.  Phil/lipa‘s lair was under this small deck.

And that was the other small deck off the kitchen….

We had to tear off the boards of the living room deck in order to get the new siding done, but we kept the structural supports attached to the foundation since we knew we’d re-build it eventually.

We designed the new retaining wall to act as the support for the new deck.  The joists run across to the wall and are supported underneath by the new cinder block rather than sinking tons of posts into the ground.

Now we have an L shaped deck that wraps the corner and connects the kitchen and the living room on the outside.  The dining room is in between with the big windows.

I took these the day they finished, and the snow came the next morning.

Here it is in all its unstained glory…one day, I’ll be able to get this knocked out.

You can see where the old deck ended and the new starts…I’ll pressure wash the old so I can stain it all at once.  We also hope to replace these railings with the hog panels like in the front,  but these were already there and in good condition, so, we kept them for the moment.

I took the pictures below last night so you could see the carpet of oak tassels that are falling on us daily.  It was a nice warm evening and with torrential rains moving in, we knew we’d be stuck inside the rest of the weekend.  No proper cushions yet…

*UPDATE:  Boy, was that rain thing an understatement…things are bats**t insane here…

You guys were right – I don’t regret painting the chairs orange…

BTW….That fugly lantern? Best commercial mosquito repellent ever.

We should have bought stock in OFF Power Pads when they first came out, because it’s the only thing that allows us to hang outdoors at night without spraying down.  They WORK people…and trust me…we’ve tried EVERYTHING.  I am not getting paid to wax poetic about these things……REALLY.

To Do: Treehouse

The Minors have been very patient.  We thought we could get this going last summer, but the siding took so much longer than planned, and then the rains came, and came…..and next thing we knew, that window of opportunity had closed.

No worries though. The delay actually worked out well, because we saved all the good lumber when we rebuilt the front steps and back deck, so now we have a nice cache of salvaged materials to recycle.

We’ve been sketching out ideas for a year now…and we keep changing our minds/design!

We like the open feel of this house (think MUCH simpler) and the horizontal slats would tie in nicely with the new slats going in the front.

Photos via Inhabitat

Which will look much more like this budget version….

Photo via a Prefab Project

But, because it will be built on a slope, we plan to have 2 levels on the ground like this…but screened in with a roof, like above.

Photos by Laurie Stubbs via Dwell

My dad built me a treehouse when I was a kid…and spending the night out there with my friends, in our sleeping bags, with popcorn and flashlights was a seriously wonderful thing.  I want that for them!

The roof/screening aspect is important for being able to hang out for sleepovers.  The bugs here are too plentiful to sleep out in the open. (Remember Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever?!)

We (currently) think the best spot is to the left of the trail we made last year.

The bottom level will be accessible from the bottom of the trail, and the top level will be entered at the top of the trail.

So now, we just need to finish with all that staining, dirt and gravel so we can get started. Phew.

Getting Closer

The weather has been cooperating lately, so we’ve started filling the beds with dirt, staining the new front steps with the hog panels, and installing a bit of drama in the way of landscape lighting.  I told you we’ve been busy!

We plan to build a separate fenced (deer proof) vegetable/herb garden later on, but for this year, I’m using the new side beds for edibles.  I’m playin’ it fast and loose…livin’ on the edge…risking their very lives.  I HAD to…you see, I haven’t had a garden of any sort other than this for TWO YEARS.

You either get this affliction or you are baffled by it.  Digging in the dirt and growing stuff is something I pschycologically need.  Once you’re addicted, these little pots of methadone don’t cut it.  AT ALL.   My whole lettuce crop in this pot is wiped out by a single salad for 4.

I planted many basic herbs and scattered a few seeds to get things rolling…..IF they survive.  It’s been almost a week and the deer have not bothered them, YET.  I’m planning an elaborate redneck screening device involving bird netting and thick wire in case things go as the CC predicts.  Dill, cilantro and lettuces need the cool of early spring so I HAD to go ahead and plant..out in the open….dain-jah, DAIN-JAH!!

OK…I know I sound like a crazy person, but it is, what it is.  In addition to dangling my herbs out in plain view of the local fauna, I discovered a very welcome surprise in the yard.

Hiding in the scraggled, neglected vinca minor, dead leaves and bare clay…

Is this.  Hint…3 leaves and NOT poison ivy!

Prairie Trillium.  Wahooo!  How could I have missed this last year?!  It’s a pest to some…NOT HERE.  I won’t go on, except that finding something salvageable, let alone exquisite, in THIS yard has been a rarity.  Amongst the miles of poison ivy and dead trees, we have a few of these gems scattered in the forest.  THANK YOU plant fairies.

My horsetail has been ordered for the front bed and should arrive any day, but I was afraid the dogwood will have leafed out by then, and it needed a moment.  So, until a bigger tah-dah is available for the front, I give you a mini-tah-dah sneak peek on the lighting featuring said dogwood.  More to come, I promise.