Yard

Sorry, I’m tired and that’s the best I could come up with! And technically, it was only one mommy.

This is a long overdue picture that shows all the plants that Stephanie got into the yard. It looks SO much better than before. Now that we have no more grass, all the sprinklers were disconnected, and we are 100% on drip irrigation. It’s a bit of a pain to set up, but it’s so nice to be able to target the water exactly where it’s needed. Oh, and the fact that we don’t have to nurture the gazillion new plants with manual watering is pretty great, too.

Why is there a picture of Butchart Gardens on our blog?

6 1/2 years ago we demolished the chimney that used to run through our pantry closet. It was no longer being used, as we had switched to a high efficiency furnace and a tankless water heater, both of which vented out the side of the house. The bricks sat in a pile in the side yard for six months, until we moved them to the back corner, so that we could rototill and lay sod (now deceased) in the yard.

We had grand plans of one day building a pathway, an outdoor oven or some other amazing, artistic creation as soon as we got to the point of having everything else done on the house. Even ignoring the obvious fact that we will never reach the point of having everything else done, we also gradually learned an important lesson about bricks: glazing is important. These bricks were very rough and porous and completely lacking in any kind of weather-resistance. Presumably, this is because most of them were indoors and not exposed to the elements. We started noticing that our bricks were gradually disintegrating out in the yard. They were splitting and cracking after being exposed to water and freeze/thaw cycles. It became apparent to us that the bricks were useless and now just taking up a bunch of space in our yard.

Fast forward to this summer… after our landscape contractors finished up the tough work on our side yard, we were left with a huge pile of crushed rock. I estimated that we had 6 yards remaining (out of a total of 12), so math is clearly not our landscaper’s strong suit. Wanting to take advantage of it while we had it, we decided to go ahead and clear out the weeds and debris from the other side of our house and gravel both sides of the narrow walkway. Our house is only about 5′ from the property line, as is our neighbors’ house, so this area has been long neglected. I ordered a dirt/sod dumpster and spent much of this last weekend loading up our yard cart with dirt, wheeling it to the front of the house, carrying it down the stairs and rolling it up into the dumpster. Fun stuff! One of the cool things about the dirt/sod dumpster, though, is that concrete chunks and bricks are also acceptable materials.

Knowing that we would never want to pay for another dumpster, I made myself go out Monday night after work and spent 3 1/2 hours hauling all 820 or so bricks down to the dumpster. It took 33 trips:

• Load 3 buckets with 8-9 bricks each
• Load buckets into the yard cart
• Push yard cart 90′ around the house to get to the front steps
• Carry buckets down the steps (did we mention that elevated lots make all house projects even worse than they already are?)
• Dump buckets of bricks into dumpster
• Return to back yard and repeat until finished

It sucked, but it’s done. And with the bricks gone and the side strip cleared out, we have for the first time achieved the elusive goal of having no crap or other garbage lying around our house. I found bits and pieces of most of our projects on the side of the house…a bunch of old molding from the family room, a rusted latch from an old door, empty cans of paint, rags and stir sticks from the house painting, remnants of the old galvanized plumbing….all of it is gone. It’s actually a pretty amazing feeling to walk around the house and not see all the clutter!

Brick-a-brac

An archaeological dig in our own backyard!

Here’s a composite view of the yard made from shots taken along the edge of the roof. It does a great job of showing the shape of the path. Some of the curves look sharper than they really are, which is just an artifact of the photo merge. We do want to slightly change the way the path interfaces with the step, because the landscapers didn’t follow our lines. The step is supposed to extend beyond the path on both sides by about 6″.

A little easier to visualize

Here’s what the yard looked like on Saturday, after the 4th day of work. While there are lots of punch list items yet to be completed, the overall look is infinitely better than what we had going on before the project. This will look really cool when we have some plants!

Ready for action

Here’s where things stand after the third day of work. Unfortunately, I didn’t get quite enough concrete for the step, and they ran out while filling my form. So we grabbed some more, and I finished it up that night. Although it’s only one step, it provides a nice delineation between the area adjacent to the patio and the rest of the yard.

Now we can clearly see the outline of the path, and we’re pretty excited about how it looks so far. Only 10 yards of gravel to go, and it’ll be done. We are so glad not to be moving it all the way up into our yard ourselves!

Looking up...

and looking down

Here is what the yard looked like after a day of digging and pulling weeds.

Getting dirty

Because of the massive volume of dirt that needed to come out and the even larger amount of gravel to be carried up, we made the decision to hire out the “scaping” part of the project. We will be handling the plants and mulching, but there was no way we wanted to carry all the materials up and down from our elevated, difficult-to-access lot! Here are some pictures from the night before they started.

A few months back we asked my dad (a landscape architect) to help us out with a plan for our side yard. He put together the awesome plan below, which we are now attempting to construct.

We’ve made a few changes along the way as we started to lay things out, particularly regarding the steps. While we think the multiple step design looks amazing, but once we started envisioning the path, we realized that our yard’s slope really isn’t too steep. A simple, winding gravel path would do the job just fine. However, we did have a bit of a grade transition to deal with at the top (the area in front of the playhouse), so we modified the design to use a single, wide step at the top. Otherwise, we are following the spirit of the plan pretty closely.

The Plan

Added to the playhouse this weekend:

• one set of X railing
• the back horizontal railing
• the plywood back wall

We had intended since the beginning to make the back wall completely solid, but now that 1/2 of it is done, we are liking the more open air feeling and look.  We’ll let it gel for awhile longer, but that’s probably how it’s going to stay.

New rails and back wall

After my recent learning experience on how to properly space cedar roofing shingles, I had gradually been reworking the roof.  Yesterday Chloe went to play at the neighbors’, so I had a big block of time to keep pounding away.

Installing these is tedious, but they really are beautiful.  I got everything done up to the ridgeline, so all I need to do is install some flashing on top to complete the job.