Mike and Jeff's New House

   We're excited to report that our house is finally, really, officially DONE!  The shower hardware in the third-floor bathroom was installed this past weekend.   Yes, we moved in back in June of 2006....Don't judge... 

How's it possible that it's already been ten years since we built our house? It seems like we just moved in.  Since moving in during the summer of 2006 we have been busy with lots of landscaping projects, here are some current views. The Elm Tree that we planted in the front has really started to take off, by this time next year it will provide great shade in the afternoon. Jeff drives a Chevy Volt and he built this little hutch to hold the charging cord for the car. We are harvesting solar electric power off of our roof to feed his vehicle. One of our favorite projects was to install this outdoor shower.  We hardly ever use the shower in our bathroom during the summer months. The hot tub is in the same garden room as the outdoor shower and the retractable clothes line, it's our own little bit of heaven... The final big project in our garden is finishing this home greenhouse.  I will use it to start vegetable seeds and to overwinter my tender suc...

It's been a while since we have posted here. I will push some new photos up over the holidays.  We have added the hot tub and outdoor shower... All we have left to add is the greenhouse and this project will finally be `done'.

Our fountains bring a bit of sound and movement to the patio, the vessels are from Green Acres Nursery in Sacramento and the patio was installed by Lee Reveles Landscape.

Our installer was Lee Reveles Landscape, HIGHLY recommended, they did excellent work...

  Pavers in the driveway that leads to the alley

We installed a Weathermatic irrigation system controller.  It is connected to an on-site weather station that monitors temperature, rainfall, windspeed, and humidity. As the seasons change, it automatically adjusts the station timing, very handy! UPDATE:  We had nothing but trouble with this controller and in 2016 we replaced it with a dramatically better one from Rachio. See it here: https://www.rachio.com/ Better yet, the City of Sacramento has a rebate program to replace old controllers with `smart' controllers like the Rachio, check it out here: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Conservation/Rebates/River-Friendly-Landscape-Rebate  

We are building a fire-pit into the patio on the freeway side of the house.  The first step in the process was building a masonry bench on one side of it, the bench is done and the gas line is installed, next up is installing the burner and the patio pavers...

We have been staining fences for 5 weekends and have lured many friends into helping us...it takes a long time, but the results are worth it...

We are installing a fountain system that will use 3 linked aqua basins from Aquascapes.

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....

The Garden Shed now has a coat of stain on it and the tin roof has been attached, here is a middle of the weekend progress photo....