Mike and Jeff's New House

We were going to rent a laser level but discovered that Home Depot sold one that cost less than the one-day rental.... This thing is very helpful in making sure that the posts are all set at the same depth.... This weekend is Jeff's birthday, our friend Mike Fuhr came up from Irvine to help us celebrate and to get a lesson in the careful art of precision post hole installation......We had a lot of fun and are VERY grateful for Mike's help.... Here Mike and Jeff are using the laser level to check the depth of one of the holes before we placed the post... Here is the laser and the tripod that it sits on.... Once the hole was about an inch deeper than the target depth, we put gravel into the bottom of the hole.... After the gravel is poured in, we put the post in the hole and then re-checked the depth with the laser level and then used a level to make sure it was going in vertically (on both sides). We put in the two end poles first (and used a little geometry to figure out the e...

On Sunday we put our first posts into the ground. These 4 will be the frame for a screen between our house and the neighbors. The `filler' will be made of Lexan, the double-walled rigid plastic panels used in commercial greenhouses. Privacy and good light at the same time. Direct View Jeff cut the tops of the posts to mimic the roofline of our house. On Sunday we put our first posts into the ground....

On Saturday we rented a two-man auger with a 10 inch bit and used it to dig 21 holes...It took lot less time than it would have taken to do it by hand.....It looked like this, except without the hard hats.... Here is where our utility storage area will be...... This is the other end of the patio area....It's sort of a mindfield out there...

After talking with a friend who is an arborist, we decided to take out the redwood that was damaged in the January storm. As long as we were doing that, we decided to have two other redwoods removed so that we would have more room for a patio and a hot tub. Here's our tree guy taking out the tree just outside our kitchen window. Don't do this at home....

Good soil is comprised of three primary building blocks: Sand, silt, and clay. One of the challenges of post-construction soil building is getting rid of the rock and concrete chunks that inevitably end up scattered around the site. Here is what the `soil' looks like in our front courtyard. This area was the primary site for stucco mixing and a large load of gravel was dumped here when they installed the foundation. In addition to that, the area had a LOT of compaction. What to do? I knew that in order to get anything other than weeds to grow here, I was going to have to get some of the gravel and concrete and stucco layers out of the soil. One shovel at a time, I screened the soil in the planting bed on the freeway side of the sidewalk. I'm not sure what this steel grate was originally used for, but today it was a gravel screen. After removing five 5-gallon buckets of gravel from the right side of the sidewalk, I added some compost and it is starting to look like garde...

Spring Fever hit hard this week in Sacramento...It was 70+ degrees all weekend and it was a zoo over at Green Acres Nursery on Saturday. We picked up this Magnolia stellata for our front courtyard...