Staked out

Today, we got home from work and staked out our backyard. We're really visualizing a patio and path back here! Sometime before Sunday, we'll be raking the gravel off to the side to repurpose in a drainage trench. Then, this upcoming weekend, we are going to break out the heavy machinery and move some dirt to get the foundation for our new hardscape started. Stay tuned!

Here today, gone tomorrow

Well, our giant pile of rubble is packed up and ready to be hauled away. We got super, super lucky and found some folks via craigslist to come take the large pieces of concrete. It was a win win because now we don't have to pay for disposal/recycling and they get some free material to build their retaining walls. Justin ordered up a dumpster for the smaller scraps and we filled it up in quick time and still had a mini pile remaining. The pile wasn't large enough to warrant using a dumpster so we decided to take a trip to the dump with it. We also filled up our yard waste bin with so many weeds that we can barely move it. We are hoping that it is not too heavy to collect.


We have a lot of small pebbles and gravel that was under the slab of concrete and we are hoping that when we install our drainage trench and french drain, we will be able to reuse this material for that. If you look closely in the picture above you can see the contour of the filled-in trench where Justin installed water and electricity to the garage last weekend. I want to have an easy option for irrigating my vegetable beds when we put this yard back together and thought that a spigot off the garage was a better option than drawing water from the spigot on the house. And, despite being wired up inside of the garage, the previous owner never actually pulled power from the panel to power the garage. So, Justin's got the conduit in place to allow for us to actually wire the garage to a real power source, not just thin air.

A pile of rubble

We wasted no time busting up the concrete in the back yard. See, we need a place to put the dumpster for the concrete and we didn't want to put it on the grass because we are going to need to level it using heavy machinery which we also hope to use to bust up and load the rest of the concrete. Can you believe it took Justin and I less than 2 hours to build this pile? Big changes are coming to this backyard soon!

Demolition Again!

And we're back...After 2 weeks of frolicking in Europe, we decided to dive right into hard labor on our first day back.

Here's our back porch, deconstructed.

And here's a view of the siding removed, and being reinstalled. Check out the cool shadow!

Back in the game

It's been a dull few weeks for this household seeing as we both caught a cold and mine was bad enough that I can't breathe well all of the time. So, we've been piddling around with little chores here and there but mostly laying on the couch convalescing. This weekend brought 60+ degree weather and we figured that we might feel a little better after an afternoon in the sun. I had just the project for a warm February day! A new pathway.

We have around 800 bricks from the chimney that our circle of friends helped us deconstruct last January. Justin and I built a walk between the curb and the sidewalk in the front today using about 1/4 of the brick pile. This is the first of the hardscape projects that I have planned for the first half of 2010. We'll be tackling the backyard next and installing a patio, several walkways around the patio, and a new back stoop/deck. However, for this sunny February Sunday, we just have a new walkway.

Here's Justin tamping down the gravel for a solid base:

And the finished product:


And here's Justin in true filth. He not only covered with brick dust but also car grease from "fixing" the muffler on the old pickup. By "fix", I mean remove.

2010 Flower & Garden Show

I thought I would share some shots of the garden show. There were a few things there that caught my eye.

I wonder what the real Dr. Chomsky would think of this? I thought it was funny.
Here's a lovely panorama of one of the gardens. My preliminary garden sketches for the backyard are leading me toward something like this...a big patio with 3'-5' beds along the perimeter.

This was one of the coolest new ideas I saw this year. It's a vertical strawberry bed. It's something I think I might be able to make work in my space.

And this was my all-time favorite new plant (at least new to me): 'Midwinter Fire' Bloodtwig Dogwood. The photo doesn't do the color justice. And doesn't it look fabulous with the black mondo grass?

All in all, the show this year was a little bit less amazing then in previous years. The first year I attended, maybe 2003, there were tons of freebies and awesome coupons from the nurseries around the area. This year, there wasn't much of that. I think I came home with three packets of seeds and a single coupon to a nursery in Lynnwood. The show organizers seem to have let in a lot more shed-builders and window replacement vendors. There are still some awesome booths, Ravenna Gardens had one for sure and some of the more far-flung nurseries were peddling some interesting plants. Prices seemed a little steeper than my last memory and it didn't look like the vendors were selling as much given the huge masses of people at the show. This was the year for the longest ticket line for sure.

But as usual, the show didn't fail to inspire and with a backyard that is a blank slate (well, more like a blank concrete), I needed a few grand ideas to get me thinking.