Yet another of our examples of the obvious. A year and a half ago, I re-shingled our porch roof, which had been leaking badly. As part of that project, I adjusted the gutter to slope towards the downspout, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it’d be better to have the water head in that direction instead of just pooling up in the front and constantly spilling over the lip. While that was likely an admirable idea, it turned out that the downspout had been installed too high on the side of the house, so I wasn’t able to reattach the connecting piece, as it would have only worked if water somehow started flowing up instead of down. And like so many house projects, once the major part is done, it’s oh so easy to let the little stuff fall into the “I’ll get the parts and fix it next weekend” trap.

Fast forward to a year later, and we gradually began to notice cracking on our porch floor. At first I thought it was my imagination, but eventually it became obvious that the crack was growing. After a bunch of head-scratching, I figured out that the right side of the porch (near the aforementioned gutter) had sunk about 1/2″. While that might not sound like much, apparently it was too much for our megalithic concrete porch, so something had to give. And unfortunately, that something was the top deck of the porch, right in front of the door. Seeing the damage and seeking to head off any additional expense to our future repairs, I sprung into action and “solved” the problem by propping up a board with some bricks to force the water to drain away from the porch. But don’t worry, we’ll do the permanent fix next weekend…

The planter bed, with the new crape myrtle and jasmine plants.  You can see our next door neighbor’s planter bed, too.

We ran electricity out to the patio and installed our old dining room chandelier. Low wattage flicker bulbs add to the ambience, as do our new Craigslist bargain table and chairs (only $100 for the set - woo hoo!)

Julio used a conduit bender (for the wiring) for the first time, and the thought it was a lot of fun. Earlier in the year his company remodeled his office, and he was able to salvage tons of old electrical conduit and boxes. That came in handy for all the practice he needed to get it right.

Our friend Scott came over with his truck and yanked the nasty junipers out of our planter bed.  Our neighbors all seemed to be really happy about this…

 The “treehouse” effect we get in the summertime.

 Our bare patch from last summer got completely overgrown with grass and weeds.

You can see the giant apartment building behind our house.  The patio cover serves a secondary purpose of giving us privacy from the building.

We removed the chimney to create space for a bigger pantry closet and a chase for heat ducts to the upstairs.  This was possible to do, because our new furnace and tankless water heater duct directly out the side of the house, making the chimney obsolete.  Our friend James pitched in once again to help take us take it down.  He worked like crazy with the cold chisel and sledgehammer, while Julio carted the bricks out to the backyard.  They were able to get the whole thing down in only 2 hours.  The old mortar helped a lot, as there wasn’t much holding the bricks together.

These look much better than the old (non) windows.

The football field size cover over our back patio.  It is a fantastic thing to have in a rainy climate!