The door fence

We're putting a fence across the top of our driveway and replacing the hideous old fences around the back to create a courtyard you can access through the kitchen door. It will also include the new brick paved patio we made last month.

We were going around to salvage yards looking for cool inexpensive wood when we saw all the old doors. The doors are basically a great big solid piece of very old very hard wood that has a cool look. Perfect!

We got a great deal on 26 doors and have found more in trash piles since then. We only need a few more to have enough to complete it.



They'll take a lot of scraping, sanding, painting etc to be ready to weather the next decade outdoors. Marco's been working hard at it.


The first task of construction was to do the front section across the driveway. We needs to dig 2' holes through concrete. Luckily Marco's uncle had a sledge hammer and a post hole digger.


Never again will my mini be parked at the top part of the driveway like that. That part of the driveway is going to be inside the courtyard and the new location of patio furniture and a fire pit!


Of course any project at my house would be incomplete without finding something unexpected. About a foot down in this hole under the driveway he dug up a brick that exactly matches the ones used on my house. Marco put all the posts in last week with the help of our neighbor Louis while I was finishing my stuff for the new Salvage House Pocket Boutique inside Zola's Everyday Vintage.



But once that was done I got to paint and prime the doors and fill in the holes with caulk and foam.


We can't have water seeping in and rotting our doors so we're sealing them up as best we can. After the foam hardened I sliced it off even, put a layer of caulking on, and painted it closed.



And then they finally got around to putting the doors up!!






It still needs a second coat of paint and more doors but it's starting to look great already!!



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Random things dug up

Add this to the list of unusual items found while doing normal work around the house.






Digging out a hole for a new climbing rose I hit something metal and thought it was a cast iron pipe. It was a cast iron pan buried 6 inches deep about a foot away from the porch.

I LOVE HAVING AN OLD HOUSE. You never know what you'll find next! I need to do a post on all our unexpected finds.

Remember when I discovered a hose faucet under three inches of dirt? The stalinist drawing on the back of a wood panel in the cabinets? Oh, or the buried sidewalk by the back patio! The plastic bags of sod under the grass...
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Chicken Coop Update!

This is about where we left off last time. Since then we only added some paint. Then we didn't do a thing for a few months. Amanda and I both have busy schedules.

Anyway, weekend before last we got together and decided to get the roof on.





We chose clear plastic because we heard chickens like light and the area is already well shaded. We cut the pieces to overlap and screwed them down with these special screws that have smooshy washers that seal the hole that the screw makes.





Finally! Someone took a photo of me! Oh, except you can't tell it's me.





I got the job of cutting the roof because of all my time spent with scissors. It's really tough stuff to cut, always about to crack and split, but I think I did a pretty good job.





They're going to have a great view.






Then we started adding the perches. We made them out of a couple of the many branches taken down recently.





And last but not least, the nesting boxes had to be built inside.











We added decorative bumpy wavy wood at the top of the door opening. It's cute and the door will close against it. (It's supposed to be for the wavy plastic roof but didn't fit right, so we made it purely decorative) We also put it on top of the walls between the nesting boxes. Toby actually really liked the finished interior, sniffing and looking around when I put him in as a joke.

Next is the doors and hinges, as well as the wire fence for their yard. Oh, and the walkway up to their door too.

Amanda named our coop the "Four Seasons Chicken Resort" We'll welcome our first chicken guests in the spring. Can't wait!

Marco said to me in a mocking tone "chicken resort?! Where's the pool?" So I think I'm going to give the chickens a beautifully tiled puddle too. Perhaps this summer for when it gets hot. This is going to be so fun.




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Bricks

I've become a bit obsessed with bricks.

I've decided I want to pave a section of our front yard for a parking area...and why not do the the back patio area too. That way Lady can run around the soon to be courtyard and not create a mud pit.

What I found out after getting excited about paving both these areas is that bricks are expensive. I estimated I needed at least 1,300 and they're normally $.25-$1 each, which doesn't seem like much until multiplied by 1,300. So I decided I'd keep a lookout for old brick piles here and there and collect them. (let me know if you have some or see some!)

Then I found the jackpot. It got me my first 400 or so bricks.

The old Alamo Motel being torn down had a big pile of bricks and wire and concrete and general debris in amongst the bulldozers and dump trucks. After assuring myself I was not being insane I drove up onto the destruction site, asked the dump truck driver if I could "take a few bricks for my garden," and filled the mini truck. The guy kept saying "now don't hurt yourself!" He had no idea who he was talking to. And I wasn't even in impractical girly shoes. I was wearing my boots!





That's 163 bricks.

A few days later Marco and I went back for more.











This pile was much smaller then the original one I picked bricks from, but it was all bricks so it was easier.





You can see where the bricks used to all be, where they're being torn off the wall.






We had to stop loading when I noticed the car was riding really really low. Compare:





Normal tire to wheel well clearance in the front






Tire about the touch the top of the wheel well in the back! We drove really slow and avoided potholes all the way home.

That load got about 180 bricks.

It took few days of work but we got the back patio laid.
Here's the yard before, with a futon couch frame out there in quite the useless messy area.












This is a pot that someone set down probably 10 years ago and forgot. Now the little plant in that pot has completely grown through the bottom with huge roots going into the ground and a trunk so big it's busting the plastic open. There's two of these side by side. We tore the old pot off the other one and will get this one off soon too.



First we had to dig out the grass and gravel and dirt, then lay the bricks down, then fill the cracks with dirt.



After a couple days working a couple hours each day we got it almost done. I decided that instead of filling the whole area with bricks (which would mean finding more because we were running out) that we would end it with a curve and leave space got plants and grass.

After about 6 hours of work total, and a few good helpers, it's done. I don't seem to have a photo of the finished thing though, and everything outside is covered with and inch of ice and 6 inches of snow right now so as soon as it melts I'll take a photo and put it up here. Suffice to say, it's beautiful.

Now we just need about a thousand more bricks and we can do the front.

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How do you Pick a Colour for the Windows?

My beautiful house is painted with the same all over white trim that's used on most red brick houses. It's cliche and boring, and that simply will not do. I've been looking at other houses collecting ideas and obsessing over what colours to use for months.

I've noticed that the best looking historic houses have three colours, and use two in the windows.


This one really shows the power of a darker colour in the window frame to improve even the bland colour palette of off white windows on red brick.

On a detour through Kessler Park on my way home from Home Depot I found this red brick house with it's almost black blue trim and pops of stone. I love it.

It's unique without being flashy. It has a sophisticated country mansion sort of feel to it. Warm and rich; thick on the senses rich.

But how could I incorporate both the simplicity of the very dark blue trim and the well established superiority of having two colours on the window?

After weeks of wondering and pondering I read a comment online that said one way to incorporate more colours into a historic exterior while keeping it cohesive is use a darker or lighter shade of the same hue. BRILLIANT!!
So I decided to make the window's main trim and the awning a dark blue and accent the window frame with a dark red that is a similar but richer shade of the brick colour.

This book is how you get an exact brick colour. Well, this and bring in a brick. They generally hide these books behind the counter and you have to ask for them. They show ALL the colours, and it's a lot more than the selection of square paint chips on the wall.
I ended up after a number of paint samples deciding on the colours in the right side of this photo, the really dark blue and the dark brick red. It looks even darker from a distance. Now I just have to wait for the weather to get nice again so I can strip off the old paint and caulk, replace any rotted wood, recaulk, prime, and paint the windows one by one. Should be fun! Fun in an exhausting yet rewarding kind of way.

New blinds make a HUGE impact

I've never replaced the crappy blinds that came with the house. There just seemed to be so many more important things to do that -I thought- would make a bigger impact on the house.

I was so wrong.

Now, looking back, I'm embarrassed to show how terrible they looked before. I would pull them all up first thing in the morning so no one would see them (and because I like the open feel) so many of you who have been to my house may have never seen them



Missing and broken slats were everywhere around the apartment. (I put all the more decent blinds upstairs in my tenant's space.) In the living room of my apartment the one on the far right wasn't long enough so we put a couch pillow in the window at night so people couldn't see in the house.



And here it is with new 2" faux wood blinds slightly open to let the light stream in. Now I leave them down and just tilt the blinds during the day to let in light because I love how they look so much!


In the sewing room, you can see a section where all the slats at the bottom are broken. The one next to my sewing machine was so bad I kept it up all day and night and threw it away ASAP hence no photo.



After new blinds it looks way better!!

And the thing I -stupidly- never expected is how much better it makes the OUTSIDE of my house look too!


The 2" slats compliment my metal canopies so well! I might be a little obsessed and silly, but now when I take the dogs outside at night I look at how nice my new blinds look with little streams of light gleaming through them and think proudly about how my house is now definitely the nicest looking on the block.

Oh ya.



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Lincoln logs, no...POPKEN logs

I saw some huge pieces of ancient chopped up tree near the Fiesta Supermercado a few days ago on my way to Amanda's house for dinner and had a brain wave about how cool these giant log slices would look on her patio as chairs and tables. At 11:00 at night we went in the mini to check them out...hey let's try see if we can get one in the car...well that was easy, how about another...










That was Thursday. We made plans to have people help us get some of the even bigger logs on Saturday evening. The plan involved our neighbor friend Ed bringing his truck, hiring some friendly cheap immigrant labor, and Marco translating instructions. By Friday afternoon all but the very heaviest logs that would take more than 2 normal people remained. People around here like big pieces of trees! Then Ed went to Fiesta Saturday morning, stopped to see the logs we'd told him about, got a passer by to help him load the three smallest ones in this truck, and called me up.

Well, since we're all three here with the truck we might as well try to get the others ourselves if we can...and now that we have all but the two biggest "could take 6 people" sized ones we should go to that other pile I saw and get more...

I like when fun adventure projects just flow along like this. Sometimes getting stuff done is all about planning and executing steps strategically. And sometimes you just go with the flow.













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