| Sunday, October 5, 2003 |
23:41 - Turf Wars
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Pictures! Yay!
This weekend we made some major progress in the backyard. We went from fence-up-but-not-much-else to fence-and-planter-box-installed-and ready-to-start-the-deck. This involves lots of intermediate steps, but I have lots of pictures, so bear with me.
First of all, the "Before" pictures.
 
Nice, right? A little bleak, a little stark, a little empty-- a little small, for that matter. Right? The tree is kinda ugly; this is taken in Februrary, though, when I was still on the initial tour with the real estate agent. Boring old backyard. Nothing to write home about, or certainly to post about.
What you don't see, because I couldn't bear to take a picture of it from the kitchen door, was the view you get when you look straight east, straight at the wall.
For maximum horror, here it is from the upstairs bedroom window:
That's right: it's the one major reason why this house had been on the market for five months, and had had its asking price lowered twice to about 3/4 that of all the identical houses on the street. There's a friggin' power substation right behind the house.
The real estate agents were having a hell of a time getting people interested, apparently; seems it was the South-of-85 version of the Murder House that Marge sold to the Flanderses. Once, when I was standing in the cul-de-sac talking to the agent, another agent drove into the driveway and took a potential buyer inside. I heard them talking, clucking over the living room, looking at the staircase, going into the kitchen, looking outside-- and then TROMP TROMP TROMP they come running back outside, jump in the SUV, back out of the driveway, screech to a halt, and then peel out westward down the street, leaving smoking rubber patches where their tires were. And hey, it's not like I can blame them.
But we were stupid that way-- we thought, hey, we can MAKE something of this! And for what it's worth, the station doesn't make that much noise or anything, and we're sure there aren't any PCBs or anything in the soil or evil EM waves in the air. (We even get perfectly fine AirPort reception.) And the view, if you ignore the power station, on a clear day (which the above picture is not), actually looks out across the valley to the mountains on the opposite side-- it's a nice view, a valley view. It's not a view of, say, someone else's backyard.
How's that for spin?
Anyway: after a summer's worth of work both inside and out in the house, it's really become a totally different beast now. The interior colors are all different. My bedroom is now a luxurious master suite with crown moldings, new floor trim, a semi-private bath, and a divider wall with archways and red velvet curtains leading to the bed area. (Material for another post.) Art is hung on the walls. The front yard is landscaped with boulders and hibiscuses and a myrtle and a park bench. And the backyard is unrecognizable as its former self.
First order of business, after installing the hot tub (first things first), was the fence.
  
Neat, huh? It's made of redwood fence slats screwed into horizontal beams bolted to vertical treated 4x4 posts, which are each carriage-bolted into holes we painstakingly hammer-drilled through the concrete-brick fence. It totally blocks out most of the power station from ground level-- and what you can see through the latticework will be blocked out once we plant some morning glories which will climb up the vertical trellises and creep throughout the horizontal pieces.
But what shall we plant them in, my precioussss?
Why, this!
  
 
(Do be so good as to disregard the machinery littering the place. What I'm pointing at is what's along the base of the fence.)
It's a planter box, made of railroad ties. And those things are heavy! 9x7-inch by 8-foot pine beams, soaked in creosote, which fills your lungs and causes cancer when you try to cut it. But it's been wrestled into shape and pinned into position, and now all the fill soil we dug out of the front yard is piled into the box and ready to be covered with topsoil.
I should note that in the picture on the upper right, the big open expanse of dirt is where there used to be a mound of earth and turf carted in from the front, and caked into a volcanic lava cap by the summer heat. Today I moved it all, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, into the planter box. And even when armed with a pickax and a square-point shovel, it is hard to cut turf. It's got that nylon-string mesh stuff, and the big clods stick together and prevent you from getting your shovel into it. My left arm is hanging limply by my side as I type; fortunately I've trained my blisters to be prehensile, or else I'd never have been able to type this.
Anyway, that's where things stand. I may post a layout drawing of the backyard plan sometime soon; it's vital for the understanding of what's going on to be able to see the final blueprint. The deck, suffice it to say, will surround the hot tub and sit on top of the railroad ties where it juts back toward the house, and will merge flush with the edge of the planter box. The railroad ties will be painted (to reduce the creosote smell) and faced with redwood, to make it possible to sit on them. And then the box will be filled full of turf, ground-cover flowers, and nice spreading trees which will nod over the hot tub.
And then the right corner gets planted with birch groves and floored with bushes and lawn and inlaid with pavers for lawn furniture, and the left corner gets a gazebo, a flooring treatment involving lots of flat flagstones, and a round lawn. Add a few more trees as privacy screens, run 110-volt power and Ethernet and soupcan-string intercom, and voilá-- nothin' to it!
Honestly I have no idea what we've let ourselves in for. But it's been fun so far-- or at least, I'm assuming it's been fun, because most things that leave me this sore are fun.
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