Joseph and Christine’s

Amazing Technicolor

Dream Yard

PART TWO OF THREE

This is a good view of the casita. The portion to the left without windows is the storage area, which is accessed through the back door of the casita, which is shown in an earlier photo. To the right, in the area behind the windows is the spa. I designed the casita myself, but I had quite a bit of help from Don Davis, my contractor friend in Las Vegas. He poured the slab, directed the framing of three walls and the rafters (we worked on this together, but I worked at his direction), did all the electrical work, and showed me how to roof it. Later on I had other professionals do the stucco work. I made the doors and windows myself and did all the other work, including the interiors. This is the structure I had the most help on, and it was also the one that took the longest to complete. It took me one solid year to get this damned thing done. Since then, though, it’s been all peaches and cream!

This is at the rear of our house. I painted the whiskey barrels the three primary colors and the three secondary colors. Those by the raised planter are turquoise.

The barbeque area.

Altogether, there are four redwood benches, all of which have routed designs on them. Those farthest away have cloud lift designs.

This bench is attached to the front of the planter. This bench, like the other three, is cantilevered over the bricks, so if I ever have to replace the bricks, I won’t have to tear up my benches to do so.

Joseph

Next: PART THREE (The Conclusion)

Joseph and Christine’s

Amazing Technicolor

Dream Yard

PART ONE OF THREE

I have discussed the impetus for this yard on our sister blog CFT411.com, so here I thought I would simply post some more pictures of it, for those who may be interested. I won’t repeat what I already said in the blog on that site, except to say here that all of the work and all of the designs (with just two exceptions which I will discuss in good time) are my own. I worked on this yard for part of the year every year for ten years, except for the casita which required an entire year of my labor to complete. The detail pictures and their captions follow.

This is a picture of the “long and winding wall” and a picture of the back door of the casita, which leads to a small storage area. There are some four hundred stones in this wall, each of which weights 23 pounds, a total of four-and-a-half tons. The wall is 110 feet long, and there are flowers running the entire length and the sixteen additional feet beside the covered patio (which is not in this photo). At the far right in the right photo, beside the blue whiskey barrel, is the corner of the house.

I’m standing in front of the door for the storage area of the casita and looking at the reading porch. What looks like solid panels in this photo is actually panels of ¾” spindles. Altogether there are 166 spindles, all of which were installed with mortise and tenon joints, a total of 332 joints.

This is the storage shed, which we purchased as a prefabricated unit. Christine and I still had to put it together (took us two months to do so), but the design was done by others. She had the summer off that year, which came right in the nick of time, really, as without her help I would definitely have been looking at another summer working in the yard. As it was, we finished late in the year, but we did finish THAT year! I deliberately chose this particular shed to match the casita I had already made.

This is another view of the reading porch. The detail is very poor, but there’s a stylized cloud lift routed into the top of the reading porch.

This is a view of the walkway in front of the casita. The planter is on the far right. You can also see a portion of the seating area and a portion of the gazebo.

This is a view of the gazebo. It is really a raised deck, but when we first discussed it, it was going to be a traditional gazebo, and it eventually evolved into this. The portion to the right of the awnings is raised up one step from the main deck under the awnings. I’m standing on the reading porch.

Joseph

Next: PART TWO

"A Cocoon of One’s Own"

One of the things I promised my wife when we got our house was that I would customize every room of it, starting with the master bedroom, where I made an entertainment center to her specifications.

As you can see from these pictures, the master bedroom is actually a two-room suite. The vanity I’ve described elsewhere is in the sitting room, and when I was designing the entertainment center for her, I noticed that the first thing she did each morning was flip on the radio in the receiver (which was on small table at the time). Entertainment centers of this style almost always consist of an unbroken façade of drawers and doors, but I wanted to make this as user-friendly as possible, so I put the receiver on an open shelf, so she wouldn’t have to fumble with doors to turn it on and off. (For more on entertainment centers, go to CFT411.com.)

But the main reason for a custom piece was not that open shelf so much, as it was the challenge provided by the site. It was difficult to take the picture I wanted to show the relationship of this entertainment center to the bed, as it is in one corner of the room, which was all the space we really had for it. But that illustrates why a custom project is more than an indulgence at times. Nothing I could have purchased and brought home ever would have fit into that corner with the precision of a built-in cabinet.

Looking at the molding around the base now, it looks like a perfect fit, which it is, but it took an awful lot of work to make it so. That particular corner of the concrete slab this house sits on was not poured well, and it slopes front to back and side to side. The only way to correct that problem was to install a separate toe kick. The finished cabinet sits on the toekick, and the whole of the base has been covered with the base molding that makes it appear as a cabinet that just happens to perfectly fit the space it resides in.

Also, because the cabinet itself is eight feet tall, it had to be attached to the wall, but the unit itself is a simple rectangle spanning a corner. The solution to that dilemma was triangle-shaped supports in back, the legs of which were screwed to wall studs, and the cabinet itself was then screwed to the hypotenuse side. The gaps that would have appeared between the cabinet and wall with a purchased cabinet are not in evidence here because I made and installed molding on either side of the cabinet to hide the gaps and give the piece a more finished look. Finally, I should point out that this is not a "walnut-finished" piece. It is made of black walnut, which I finished with a hand-rubbed oil finish.

One of the people we showed it off to was very short, and looking up those eight feet, she mumbled, "Boy, that’s sure a lot of walnut." What Christine most likes about watching TV back there, though, is that it’s cool in the summer, warm under the covers in the winter, a cocoon of her own anytime.

Joseph