the great cover up

The garage was converted to an office, which I now use as an art studio, sewing room, and workout room. But- the last owners did it without permits they took off the garage doors, and removed the driveway as mentioned in the last post. This gives us about 400 more sq. feet of living space, but it means we can't park a car in there- but we couldn't even get a car down the driveway because of the fence at the side make it too narrow for modern cars. Well, two months after we bought the house, and it had passed all the inspections, we got a note on the door that a city inspector had come by because even though the last owners had gotten permits for new windows, new electric wiring and circuit breakers, and a new water heater, they had never had them signed off by the city. The only problem was how do we have them inspected without having the garage seen? no garage doors, no driveway, what the hell? So, we bought pavers, laid out a fake driveway going from the edge off the concrete to where the garage doors would have been- making it all wide enough for a car to drive over the gravel pit of a side yard, Then, I covered the two sides of the garage with tarps, built a bunch of 8 foot by 6 foot canvases like the flats from a theater piece, painted a couple of them with some really bad paintings of eerie ghost like doors, and had Jamie outside painting one more of them while I took the inspector around the back and sides of the house to check out everything. Jamie was under strict orders not to say anything cause he can't lie, while I can claim to be very accomplished at this often necessary skill. The inspector didn't even blink, signed off on the improvements, and was gone in fewer than 10 minutes. WHEW!

side yard

The side yard off the deck, next to the oh so glamorous black metal fence, was a gigantic gravel pit for the old owners son to play in. They had torn out the driveway, and poured in a foot or two of gravel. Jamie spent months digging up the gravel, amending the soil which originally was the hardest clay you can imagine, and then nurtured it into life. My only assistance was carting the gravel to the other side of the house to put it in the orchid area. I don't even pretend to understand how he transformed it form nothing to this.......

back yard deck

So there is a deck off the master bedroom which is 12' by 12'. The previous owners made it look tiny, tiny, tiny by putting a cheap-ass sunshade from home depot which was smaller than the deck, and only 7' high. I built a deck cover out of wood and plastic which is the same size as the deck, is slanted to keep off the rain so we can walk outside in the winter without getting wet, and has white translucent plastic on the top so it has shade in the summer, but doesn't cut out all the light. I need to take a new pic in the day time, but here's a nice, moody night shot.

dawgs

so occasionally they create extra work

dining room light

So there was a hideous hanging lamp in the dining room- it was all gold and lots of glass, a pseudo chandelier thing, which also hung down way too low over the dining room table. I decided I wanted a wood lamp, so the first time I made a shade out of mahogany veneer, and slipped it over the whole lamp that was already there, WAY out of proportion in the room, so I found an Ikea table lamp at the thrift store, used the lampshade frame as a form, turned it upside down and hard-wired it in to the ceiling and voila!

more fences

I'm gonna jump around a lot.

While here's a picture of right after I added to the fence, before it got stained, this is what it looked like when we first planted the bamboo. The next project was to cover up the weird metal fence which ran along the driveway, A few owners ago, someone erected a solid sheet metal fence to keep the neighbor's dog away from their kid ( the dog is no longer there, and we have fabulous new neighbors). So I attached wood supports to the metal, and then attached wood fencing to it so the metal fence is now sheathed in wood.

So it now looked like this, before we stained it, which will be seen when you start seeing the transformation of the gravel pit which was our side yard into the garden which is now there. The plants in this pic are jamie's cymbidiums, which will soon reside elsewhere.

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bamboo

So we also built a concrete planter to go along the whole back corner- 50 feet long in total. After building it, adding some moulding, and filling it with dirt, we planted bamboo which grew to 15 feet tall within 2 years, and this year is hitting 29 feet. This gives us not only privacy, but the wind makes it sound like rushing water.

We also brought some cuttings of Datura trees whci we've scattered around the yard.

why?

Because I thought I'd try documenting the changes our house has gone through since we bought it three years ago. Slowly but surely Jamie and I have transformed many aspects of our home, and this was a good way to document it. here are some pics of when we bought it:

This is a pic of the back yard- nasty fence, no nothing except a view of the neighbors building, which had a 2nd story added to it 2 months after we bought our home. So, I added another two feet of boards to the top of the fence for more privacy immediately.