Monday, June 29, 2009

More Yard

We put in another full weekend of work on the yard. This included two trips to Home Depot and a whole lot of manual labor.

I feel like this is becoming more of a photo blog: high on images, low on commentary. It's probably what folks are more interested in anyway, assuming anyone is interested at all (Hi Laura!).

Unrelated to the yard, another project we worked on this weekend was finalizing our bike theft deterrent system. After two thefts, we wanted to come up with something really solid. We researched the actual bike racks, but they were very pricey. So we bought a $10 fence post instead and then modified it. Here is Seth working on drilling through the post:

It was tough to find the right combination of tools (thank you again to the kind folks at the Tool Lending Library), but we finally got it working and it doesn't look half bad:

Back to the yard. It started with a little late night painting from Ilana, who "rescued" this old trellis from abadonment:

The next day, Seth stacked the stones:

This was the reason for two trips to Home Depot. These are ridiculously heavy, and moving them from the HD shelf to the cart, from the cart to the car, and the car to the yard takes a toll. Not to mention hammering some of them down so they fit on the ends. We then placed a planter box (a modified bench I built for Ilana, which itself was modified wood from an old model train layout) behind the stones and placed Ilana's painted trellis inside (with dirt, of course). Next we planted our new Star Jasmines, which Ilana then tied to the trellis.

The jasmine smells great, and helps us prove to Amanda that you don't need to buy a house just because the yard smells good. While Ilana worked on that, I hung our new cafe lights:

Here's the final product, with Ilana resting in the background:

And just for the comparison shot from earlier photos, here's the view from above:

And for the finale, here's the night shot with the cafe lights on:

Bonus Photo:
(Seymour looking at the lights)

5 comments:

Laura McCarty said...

Hi guys! Looking awesome!

clay said...

I'm interested!

Kristy said...

I read your blog! The backyard looks wonderful, you did a great job. :)

Frank Leonard said...

You two are definitely awesome in tandem with each other! (and individually . . :o) Glad you got those holes drilled ok, Seth, and Ilana, that trellis would have been a perfect job for the spray gun, which I can still bring up if you'd like . . . the night time view with the lights is beautiful, as are you two! Dad.

Amanda Schoenberg said...

Can't wait to check out the jasmine! I'm very impressed