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)
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)
The aerial view makes it look better than it was -- think weed garden and litter box for every stray cat in the neighborhood. The week before we started work on it, I removed the ugliest little bush tree I've ever seen from smack in the middle of it. Our new friend Tony helped us clear the rest and carted off literally a truckload of old dirt:
Then after laying down some fresh soil came the job of arranging our new stones. Tony was amazing and had a vision the whole time, somehow knowing when to flip certain stones or rotate others to make the perfect jigsaw puzzle.
That's Little Tony with the broom. He looks more helpful in the photo than he actually was. But we're pretty pleased with the final product:
Here it is from the ground level, though this shot was taken before we decided to move the table to the corner:
That's a Japanese Maple that we planted and are very excited about. And just in case you didn't think we did any of the work, here I am doing some fine-tuning:
We've also added two miniature succulent gardens and have plans for some more potted adventures.
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