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....

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....

After a leisurely summer, we have kicked back into project mode..... The master bathroom has twin sinks, and each side has the same storage unit configuration of 3 drawers and 3 open shelves....Jeff used IKEA drawer panels that matched our drawers to build the box up at the top, he cut a hole in the panel for the low voltage lights and now we can really see the things that are on these shelves...

Jeff has finished cutting the headers for the garden shed...Next up is the staining and then we'll attach the tin sheathing...

We found a great guy who has started a small specialty nursery focusing on bamboos adapted to the Sacramento area. The name of the company is Mad Man Bamboo and he helped us to pick out a cultivar B. multiplex `Alphonse Karr' that is a clumping type that will not get too big. http://www.madmanbamboo.com/ We put 3 of them in the ground outside our dining room window on the south side. Now that they are in, we will put in the twin wall greenhouse glazing in between these posts....

Alas, before planting we have a bit more work to do. The front courtyard area is where gravel for the foundation was dumped and then compacted by construction vehicles. On top of that, the guys that did our stucco mixed all of their concrete and sand in this area... So, shovel by shovelful, Mike spent an entire Saturday digging up a bed about 2.5 feet wide by 6 feet long and running it over a steel grate to filter out the gravel and concrete pieces... Flowers by Spring!

We installed the vacumn unit for the whole house vacumn cleaner out in the garage in late May...All the tubing was run during construction, we were finally able to afford the actual unit...the first and second floor each have two outlets, the third floor only needed one as it is not as big..... We LOVE it...works like a charm...dragging the vacumn cleaner up three flights of stairs lost its charm long ago...now we just drag the hose from floor to floor..

When we first built the house we knew that we wanted solar shade screens, but we ran out of money...In anticipation of having the money one day, we installed the wall switches and wiring for all 5 screens and we also put smurf tubing through the walls so that when we were able to afford the screens, the installation would be easy.. After two years, we finally were ready to bite off the expense and had the electric screens installed on all the big East, South, and West facing windows. The difference is amazing. Our house just does not warm up during the day....

Over the past 3 weekends Jeff has been busy with the garden shed....He has installed the treated 2x12's that will be the base for the walls, he notched the top of the 4x6's, he has crafted the headers that tie the system together and he has started to attach the top pieces that will serve as the point of attachment for the roof...one weekend at a time, we're getting there.

Tree Care Incorporated delivered 5 yards of their nicely ground wood chips a couple of weeks ago. Mike spent a Saturday morning making the front of the yard look a little more cohesive.....It has dramatically cut down on the amount of watering that has been required.

This is the `before' look......The chain link fence separates us from our neighbors....We are replacing that fence with a wooden fence that will do double duty as a fence/garden shed. Here is the `After' look.....It was a nice view into our old garden next door.... And this is what it looked like at the end of the weekend....We put in the 6 posts that will be the support posts for our new garden shed. It will have two sets of double doors that open to the driveway.....

The final drawer pulls (16 of them) were installed by Jeff this past weekend......The Laundry area finally looks `done'.

One does not want to rush into some things, that's why it took us almost two years to locate and install the perfect house numbers....but this past weekend they were installed and they look great.... Here is the finished product.... Here is the mock-up just prior to installation and down on the ground is the house sign that has been there ever since construction.....

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...