Crucial update

Before two feet of snow took up residence in our backyard we figured out that it was a raccoon or raccoons who had been relieving themselves on our lawn. Lots of paw prints and a sighting.

Carry on.

A little privacy

Sorry about the absence of blogging for the last two months. Life got really busy with some un-fun stuff. On top of that, our projects have been pretty low-key lately (replant this thing, mow that, etc.), with one exception: a wall on our patio.

We have a gorgeous outdoor space that we access just off our dining area. Because we're working on landscaping, decor, and finishes slowly, this space was totally exposed to the street on its east end. Part of the design of the house was always to have a wall on this end of the patio as a privacy shield to the street, so when we poured the concrete for the patio almost a year ago (!), Davido added some bolts to the pony wall in anticipation of this eventuality.

After pricing things out and thinking of the best way to maximize our limited budgets and claim the most privacy for the house, we settled on this patio wall as the first step. (Future steps will include a fence with the neighbors, a gate for this wall, and some window coverings for the dining area. All in good time, though.)

Tai did a couple of designs before we settled on one that would fit the horizontal cedar on the house. He grabbed the hardware to attach upright posts to the concrete wall and framed everything out in mid-August:


All that plywood cladding was reused from our construction scrap stash -- win-win for the dump and our wallets.


The wall sat dormant for a few weeks at this intermediate stage. It worked immediately, though, as we were able to enjoy our patio without sharing it with every passing pedestrian and driver.

Then, Tai used some scrap tar paper for some mild water-resistance at the top of the wall, and started putting up the cedar boards Labor Day weekend. He used a few leftover cedar boards from siding the house and garage, and then filled in the rest with a trip to Sutherlands. He pre-sealed the boards with two coats to match what we did on the boards for the house.


He did a great job spacing the ends of the boards uniformly on both sides of the wall so that there aren't any awkward joining spots. This is where it really pays to have married someone who spent his entire childhood working on house projects -- he is precise and meticulous about doing it right. He takes only a little more time, but he makes it look a hundred times better.


My sole contribution to this project (besides replenishing the water pitcher) was to stain the cedar at the end of it all to get it the same deep beautiful color as the wood on the house. This took me all of about 20 minutes, but I still managed to dribble stain on the concrete, which you can see if you look closely at the bottom left of the wall. Oops.

I think that spacing out the house/yard projects makes it easier for us to enjoy them along the way. We were really hoping to fence in the backyard (especially because various neighborhood animals -- please, please let it be animals -- keep using our yard to relieve themselves), but that will probably have to wait. In the meantime, it's still been great to make incremental progress where we can. Oh, and our house is still awesome.

Mid-summer yard update

This is the year of the great squash experiment. Not knowing a blessed thing about the plants we were planting (as in, did you know that pumpkin vines can grow to be 35-40 feet in length? I didn't!), we have overloaded our tiny backyard garden box with two pumpkin vines, a yellow squash vine/bush, a zucchini plant, four cucumber plants and two broccoli plants.

The overall effect:


Up close with squash overload. Zucchini in the top right and one of the pumpkin vines in the bottom left:


Produce! This is so far the only pumpkin we have produced for our pains. It is ripe, beautiful and lovely. So now we have a pumpkin in August.


These pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped themselves around patches of grass in the backyard, holding on for dear life. I think they're gorgeous on their own, though.


The broccoli...that we're hoping will turn into something edible one of these days:


The cucumber vines and our nascent basil plant:


Fresh cucumbers from the garden are our top delight this summer:


Pepperoncini, for which I have my doubts, mostly due to serious overshadowing by pumpkin leaves:


That's all in one garden box. In the other backyard box, we planted a couple of varieties of carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Little Finger and Carnival Blend -- Carnival was the least successful).


And this is what happens when you get a radish packet from Matthew Moore at Sundance and figure, eh? Why not? But then realize that neither of you like radishes (nasty little things):


Then, we have a third garden box (clearly in over our heads) by the kitchen. By and large it has been scorched by the heat and exposure of our site, but a few things have survived. Namely, the tomato plants that I didn't kill are now threatening to take over the house:


And this is the end of a fight with arugala. It started out so lovely, with spring greens that we added to salads and quiches. It ended with an insane patch of flowering plants that crowded out everything else. So I hacked it back:



...and made room for a watermelon vine that has showed its appreciation for the extra space by doubling in size over the last few days. I'm still hoping that this will produce something before the first frost.


In the rest of the yard, our front yard on the south side was not getting full coverage from the sprinklers. So now that Tai is a pro, he added a few extra heads to hit our borders:


But the best thing about the summer has been slowing down and enjoying the results of all our hard work over the last 18 months. It's a bit surreal to think of where we were a year ago and where we are now. That was a lifetime ago.

New moderns

Just a hat tip to all the folks in our area doing new modern projects -- it's great to see a swell of infill modern homes. Grassroots Modern is keeping tabs on a few, including the one we drive past every day: ul[1] on 900 East around 700 South.

We like the lines, suspect the architect is the son of a former neighbor in our original slc202 condo building by the University of Utah, and love the privacy walls in the outdoor spaces (can you tell we still haven't built our fence yet?).


But this was our favorite:

"We had been looking for a lot in the up and coming neighborhood of the Salt Lake 9th and 9th area for a period of 3 years. This area is extremely competitive for vacant land and building small modern homes is beginning to be the trend. This has been going on in other metropolitan areas for years but we are seeing an increasing demand for this type of product in SLC for which there is few to choose from. I believe we are raising the standard for this building type in the area and am very excited to see it being constructed." (emphasis mine)

We also loved this gem (in a non-sarcastic sense):

"The house achieved Gold LEED standards but the owner opted for spending the additional 5-6 thousand in other areas instead of the LEED testing and registration fees."

Amen.

Cedar siding

We knew when we agreed to this design that our cedar siding would take some upkeep if we wanted to retain its color. Without a yearly coat of sealant, the wood will fade and eventually gray, and we want to keep it looking fresh as long as possible.

Even though the cedar was sealed with two spray coats before it was installed, we could tell that it needed a refresh after the winter weather and Utah sun.


It took both of us about eight hours total to seal, with the majority of that time spent maneuvering very tall and heavy ladders.


We love the red look and can tell that the wood was due for a fresh coat -- it nearly glows now. So even though it will be kind of a pain, we'll spend the time once a year to re-seal the wood.

(Also, we were sitting in church a little while ago and noticed this Bible verse from 1 Kings 6:9: "So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar." We had a good laugh.)

Barter

What do you do when you're flat broke but have an enormous living room wall that cries for art?

You barter away an old red couch...


...call your friends over for an evening of watching you bicker over leveling a huge sheet of painted Tyvek...


...watch your husband do death-defying stunts 13 feet off the ground...


...and replace the old couch with one you've spent two years saving for! (Found here.)


Many, many thanks to our generous friend and artist Benjamin Wiemeyer for taking pity on us and doing the barter. We love the painting and the view from the sidewalk:


(And so does the neighbor kid who just rode past and shouted, "I love your painting!")

More yard

We got the sprinklers in, got the sod down and basically stopped doing landscaping work. There are a few things we have to worry about still, though, including our parking strip:


Those used to be full of knee-high weeds, then we spent Memorial Day digging them out. The effort was so great, evidently, that we haven't done anything since then. Eventually, we plan to put in some weed fabric, plants and maybe some mulch or gravel to top it all off.

This is on our south side, just east of our patio. The drain runs to the gravel pit buried in our backyard. The white pipe is a stubbed sprinkler line for drip irrigation, which we hope will someday water a few trees and other plants in that spot. Our next project, though, is to put some more paving stones in that space to create a landing pad for our garbage/recycling/yard waste cans.


And here we're hoping to place mulch and a bunch of plants down here. But for now (because we don't have the scratch for plants) we are growing a couple of pumpkin vines, which is what the flags marked.