Mike and Jeff's New House

Shown here is the privacy screen solution that we devised to help both us and our neighbors have some privacy in our respective dining rooms....the glazing material is twin-wall polycarbonate that is used for commercial greenhouses. Light transmission is excellent and it obscures the view just enough that one has a sense of privacy.

After 5 years of no vegetable gardening I am SO excited to have 2 raised beds for the 2010 season!!! The fence along highway 50 is steel that is designed to rust, this photo was taken in October when the fence was installed and it is already starting to take on a nice reddish color... This is the rear garden shed where the potting bench will be... This is the front storage shed...It's basically a fancy-pants way to disguise our garbage cans. We didn't do many garden projects over the summer months as we were both swamped with our jobs and with volunteer work....This fall we finally decided that if we were ever going to get finished with the yard we were going to have to have some help. Thanks to the guys at Deome Builders, we now have two garden sheds, our fences are all done, and we have interior garden `walls' that will help to give some sense of garden `rooms'....

This was taken today just after I finished planting a couple of deciduous azaleas...

I can not believe how hard it was to get all the gravel screened out of the planting beds in the front courtyard... Notice to home builders.....protect your planting beds if at all possible....the compaction was intense....

Jeff spent some time re-thinking the design for the garden on the freeway side of our house. We are going to going to tackle this garden this summer.... The `floor' will be 18'' by 18'' pavers. The `walls' will be wooden (or steel) fencing offset with 3x3 steel wire for growing vines. The rectangle in the middle of the drawing is a concrete table that we are going to try to cast ourselves. The three circles on the lower side of the drawing are 3 large ceramic fountains...The lower left corner has an L shaped bench that will surround a firepit..

I used this steel screen to sort the gravel and rocks out of the dirt..... Gardening is not always glamorous... I already sorted the gravel from this bed last year, alas, when I started to dig holes for these Teucrium chamaedrys ( http://www.mountainvalleygrowers.com/teuchamaedrys.htm ) , I discovered another lower layer that meant another round of screening... this bed is deep....and my back is sore....

Here is the `eyebrow' over the front door with the twin-wall polycarbonate installed. Here is the `eyebrow' over the south facing french doors in the dining room. Here is the underside view from the dining room, the twin-wall polycarbonate keeps the patio dry in the winter and only cuts about 5 percent of the light transmission. The finished roof on the garden shed.....Now, to get to the walls and floor....