Joseph and Christine’s

Amazing Technicolor

Dream Yard

PART THREE OF THREE

This is a close-up of the area in front of the gazebo. Our soil is very hard clay that drains poorly, and the many structures I put in the yard increased the drainage problems. Rather than try to plant stuff in dirt not much different than concrete, we elected to put in a lot of decorative rock (eight-and-a-half tons of rock, as it turned out!) and then use various pots for our plants. But we did not want to just put in a bunch of the same clay pots. We varied it as much as we could.

I’m standing on the gazebo looking across the yard to the reading porch. That’s the storage shed on the left. The back panel of the storage shed has been deliberately painted to look like that on the end of the casita, which makes the end panel of the casita look even more like just a design detail. More on that in a minute.

This is taken from the gazebo looking down on the area behind the storage shed. In a few places we elected to put trees or shrubs directly into the ground.

The details on the railings don’t show up as well as I would like, but the little cap in the foreground consists of three pieces routed with a bull nose, roundover, and cove. The railings themselves consist of three pieces for the top railing, two pieces for the bottom railing, and all the spindles have coves routed on the four corners.

This is looking toward the rear of the casita. The details of the posts don’t show up as well as I’d like, but they are 4×4s which had coves routed on all four corners. Then I attached 1×2 to the face of the posts which had roundover edges routed on them. The final result looks like a pillar rather than a post. The painted panel on the end of the casita is a wall that can be removed in the event that the spa should ever have to be replaced. My first thought was to install a huge gated door, but I couldn’t see the point of looking at hinges on a door that would be opened only once or twice in my lifetime, if that. Instead, I put in headers across the end of the casita, just as I would have done, had I installed a regular garage door. Then the beam just above the painted area had a lip cut into it so the painted portion of the wall could slip under the lip, thereby ensuring that rain does NOT run into the wall, which would be the way of it, had I not put in a drip edge. The whole thing has been carefully calked and painted and looks no different than the end panel on the storage shed (which IS just a painted detail). If I should have to remove it, it would take about half a day to do so, and another half day to put it back in, but this way I’m not looking at those hinges.

Standing on the gazebo and looking down at the seating area. I made small tables for the outside ends of both the green and blue benches and put a larger corner table in between them, so people would have a place to set down a plate and a drink.

Christine calls these the harmony bells and very much wanted them for our yard. It’s strange how things work out sometimes. I won’t comment on the paranoia of those who arranged things so she had no work the summer we finished the yard, except to thank them. That job… But, as I say, what could have been a bad situation ended up working out beautifully for us! After a while the work all runs together, so it’s hard for me to remember all the things Christine did, just that I know I would not have finished that year without her. Also, thanks to her not having a job that summer we had plenty of time to pick out the pots and plants together, which was a very fun thing to do. And now we have the yard to enjoy next year and every year thereafter. So, if that sounds a little smug, well, you just should have seen the people who ran that department! But they got their pound of flesh, and we got our yard. Bless them.

Joseph