Private park

With the weather turning cooler in Texas it is actually quite pleasant to spend time outside. I do not mean to sound boastful, but I have done a lot of work on our yard since we bought the place. It was over grown with trash trees, brush, poison ivy/oak banana trees and bamboo. I had to cut down twenty or thirty trees, I forget exactly how many. Digging up the bananatrees proved to be a challenge. Spiders like to live in them and I got a bite on my leg. I was afraid it was a brown recluse but it healed up ok. Hurricane Ike took down most of our fence which was in pretty bad shape before the hurricane so it was kind of a good thing. At least we got reimbursed for half the cost of replacing it. I finally finished up the front facing fence. It only took two years! I have been documenting the gates I built for the front sides of the fence. I finally finished putting all the boards on and I have to say they turned out pretty well. I learned some things I would do differently but overall I am very happy with the final result. As I was working in the yard Saturday I was struck with how attractive it is. It is like our own little park. five years of working at it a little at a time has paid off. There is no pool, as Robin continually reminds me. There is an outhouse though. I am thinking of planting more fruit trees, possibly orange and grapefruit. It would be the perfect location for a casita (small guest type house) and a shop. I guess a person can dream.

 From the back looking toward the house

 With the gates blocking the view from the street I burned a pile of sticks and wood I had collected. I thought this would make a great spot for a fire pit. This part of the yard was completely overgrown with brush and weeds about 4 ft high and a bunch of trees when we moved in.

This is taken from the deck looking back.

 This is the North side of the house. When those two gates are both open it is wide enough to pull a mobile home through.

This door was added by the previous owner so their son could come and go from his bedroom. There was a fence around the concrete pad. That room houses the quilting studio and Robin wanted the fence gone to allow in more light. I think it looks good. There used to be a huge photinia bush in front of that window next to the door. That window is in the shower. Who would design/build a house like that?

More Gates

Ok, it may appear to the casual observer, if there are any, that I am obsessed with gates. That may be true, probably is true. Ever since we purchased this house I have had a vision of back yard access that would allow anything from a pick-up truck to a mobile home to be pulled into the back yard. My dream was to build a shop back there, but I doubt that will ever happen. But if it does I have created a way to drive back there with a semi load of building materials. I can't say this will be the last post on gates because I am not finished yet. I worked on these two Friday evening and all day Saturday. I am learning as I go. After I finished the first gate I tried to correct some of the problems and the second one went much faster and with better precision. Also better welds. Still after it was up I thought of things I could do that would make it better, which I incorporated into the design f the third and last gate. These two gates together span over 20ft. the center post is removable to create one huge opening to accommodate anything you could ever want to put into a back yard.

Finished Gate

I finished the first gate yesterday, and I am really happy with the results. It is very rigid and holds the weight well. This total span is 12 ft. It is 9.5 ft between the posts. I added a hinged end so that it will fold back and clear the higher part of the rise to the driveway as the gate is swung open. It will also serve as a small pass through. The added weight of the end caused a tiny bit more sag after I had set the latch.
Just don't look too closely at the quality of the welds. They don't look very pretty but they are strong enough.

Swinging Gates

I am in the process of building the gates for the side yard. When the fence blew down in Hurricane Ike the side gate went with it. I decided to add gates to the other side as well which would give access to the back yard for parking a trailer or what ever. One of the maintenance guys at the Salem RO taught me how to make this gate years ago. I used the design on the side yard in Olypia so I could keep the trailer hidden behind it thus keeping the neighborhood gestapo appeased. The side yard next to the garage has been my utility trailer parking spot and it will be again once the gate is completed. I need to weld on the metal pieces to attach the 2x4 to that I will nail the fence boards on. This gate will be much more rigid than the one I built in Olympia. Here are the results so far.

The gate(s) on the other side of the house, actually two of them will open the entire side yard with a nifty removable middle post that will allow any size vehicle to drive into the back yard. There will be a small gate that is big enough to drive the lawn tractor through. I have the posts in but have not built the gate yet. I will post pictures later.

Outhouse

I have been interested in old outhouses for several years. Actually, I am not the only one as it turns out if you google outhouse you can view quite a bit of information and photographs of old outhouses, including an explanation of the moon cut out you typically see on the door. You'll have to look it up if you want to know.

 On a recent trip to Denver I went out to inspect a claim and the homeowner had an outhouse made from old weathered wood siding and rusted metal roof. It looked so cool I  knew I had to build one. I didn't have access to any old barn wood or rusted metal for the roof so I had to settle for materials I had available.  I used some lumber I had accumulated to frame the floor and walls. I would like to have purchased rough cut lumber or cedar 1x boards for the siding, but I wanted to use something a little more budget friendly. I settled on pressure treated pine fencing. It has taken a while but today I finally built and installed the door. It is a little bigger than most outhouses, but it also serves as a storage shed for gasoline and garden tools.

In about 20 years it will have the aged look and character of this outhouse which was the "inspiration" for my outhouse.

Wall Texture

My favorite type of wall texture is heavy knock-down. I learned how to do it myself from a friend in Tumwater, Damon Stevens. After Damon taught me how to do it I bought my own spray rig and have textured many rooms. At the time this was the best DIY spray rig on the market and it works great. It has three sizes of tips for different textures, rather than the old style with a rotating disc with different size holes. I have also blended orange peel textures and acoustic ceiling texture with it with good results.

I use thinned joint compound and dial the pressure back to about 40 psi. I noticed early on that if I did not do a good job feathering out the joints that they would show in certain light. I naturally concluded that I needed to start with a smooth wall in order to achieve good results. After skim coating the walls of three rooms in this house I decided to try it without skim coating. The walls in this house have some kind of roller applied texture that is not very attractive and un-duplicatable as far as I am concerned. Skim coating is a LOT of work, messy and requires a lot of sanding. See my previous posts.

For the master bedroom and the office I sprayed the texture over the existing texture with no prep to speak of. I did take a 6" knife and hit some of the really high spots to knock them down a bit. the results were amazingly good. To me they don't look any different than the rooms I spent days skim coating.  Needless to say, I won't be doing any more skim coating.

This is an unpainted wall.

After painting. You can't tell that the knock down was sprayed over another texture.

Some Pretty Fine Shootin

I took Ben out shooting while he was here in Houston. Turns out he is a pretty good shot with a handgun. I don't get out to the range all that often but after a little practice I got so I could make a pretty good grouping with the Browning 22 Buckmark. This is my best target.

275 foot fence

I am posting some photographs of the fence I just finished building. The wood fences blew down in hurricane Ike, almost a year and a half ago. I finally had some time at home when the weather was good and the soil was still soft. This was 275 linear feet of 6 ft cedar fence; 37 posts, 646 cedar fence boards, 56 80 lb bags of concrete. It was a challenging project. I have not built a fence since we bought our first house in Salem. It was a very small yard and the ground was level. Here the ground is not level, the old fence was not straight and many of the old posts and concrete were still in the ground along with a large tree stump I had to work around. The soil here is clay. They refer to it as Texas "gumbo" when it gets wet it sticks to everything like glue. When it is dry it is as hard as concrete. The trick is to build when the soil is wet enough to dig but not too wet so that it won't stick to the tools. It was still pretty wet. I rented a one man post hole auger which proved to be a real workout. I dug about a third of the holes by hand and finished the last 22 with the auger. The layout was a real challenge. I tried to use a 50 ft string and follow the old posts but that proved to be a crooked course. I picked out a post mid way and built to that and then straight from there to the back post. There is a noticeable crook in the fence line. I have decided that either the front end is a foot or two on my side of the property line or the middle was off. I think it is the front. If the fence blows down again while I live here I'll have it surveyed before I rebuild it.

Faux Beams

When I did the drywall in the living room and dining room I did not finish the door jamb between the two rooms. I wanted to use some of the same reclaimed timber that I used for the mantle to create a beamed look for the doorway. Well that kind of went by the wayside for a while and I thought I would try to buy or make some french doors that would look old and worn. The problem is the size of the opening. it is 8 ft tall.  Finding ready made doors that fit the opening was proving to be a problem as was making them. I was really wishing that I had just wrapped the whole thing with sheet rock and had it textured to match when I had the walls done originally. I could do it now but matching the texture exactly is always a problem and I did not want a miss-match patch job. I went back to the rustic beam idea and decided to expirament with some cheap 1X lumber. I studied some distressed furniture and looked up some ideas on the internet. Here is the end result. I am pretty happy with the way it all turned out. I learned some lessons that I would do differently, but nothing that makes me want to scrap the attempt and start over. So far the reaction from everyone that has seen it has been very positive. Please feel free to add any comments positive or not.

Dining Room Progress

The dining room is comming along quite well. I have finished all the painting. I was not going to paint the ceiling but after the walls and trim were painted the ceiling looked pretty dingy so I decided to go ahead and do it. I already had a bucket of left over paint. All that remains to do is install and paint the base board and trim around the doors. I used the same red paint that was left over from when Robin painted the walls originally. The frieze and crown molding was looking pretty bad. there were some cracks showing up between the crown and the ceiling. Some caulk and a coat of glossy white paint has really made a big difference in the look.

 

Wall Texture

This is just an update on the dining room progress, which I am really happy about. It took two days for the skim coat to dry in the corner on the outside wall without any insulation in the bay. I debated about cutting the drywall out and adding some insulation but decided not to. It goes against my nature so I still have twinges of regret when I think about it. I find it very hard to leave a mistake uncorrected.

Thursday afternoon I sanded the walls and yesterday I sprayed the texture. I have to say this is the fastest I have ever completed such a task. It took me many days between trips to complete the bedroom. once the skim coat is on it must be sanded. Sanding drywall joints and patches is a laborious and messy job. The dust is extreemly fine and seems to find it's way into every place in the house from one end to the other. I decided to try mechanical sanding this time. I hooked the shop vac to the dust port on my random orbital sander and with 80 grit paper sanded all three walls in about an hour or so. The really cool thing is that there was no dust! The vac did a superb job. I can't believe it has taken me this long to figure this out!

There are a couple of good reasons actually. One is that the vacume adapter for my sander really didn't fit well(thanks to Porter Cable)It just occurred to me that wrapping a single layer of duct tape(the handy-man's secret weapon) around the port on the sander would hold the adapter in place. It did! I tried electrical tape in the past and the results were not acceptable.

The second and biggest reason is my recent discovery of bags for the shop vac! I don't know how long they have been around, but they turn a good tool into a fantastic system. Why didn't someone tell me about these things years ago. The dust filter on a shop vac clogs with dust pretty quickly(duh)when you vaccum up any kind of fine particles. Dry wall dust is especially bad clogs the filter very quickly. Once the filter is clogged the suction is reduced substantially. The bags are fantastic. All the dust is contained in the bag and the filter stays clean. I'm telling you this is really fantastic.