Many Projects in the Works.....

Well it has been a busy week and a few more items have been completed on my house.  The columns are progressing and from the picture below you can see that the stone is getting closer to being completed.  I figure I am over the half-way point.  My brother also worked on the top part of the columns.  You can see the far three columns are already painted but still need the molding added.  Since the wood is not perfect, my brother has been working on filling the imperfections with an outdoor spackle.  He then sands it smooth and paints over it.  It makes the wood look much more uniform and adds a great finished look. 

Just to give you all a bearing of my house, below is a Google picture where you can see where everything is.  The picture is about 7 years old because it has all the junk in the yard from the original owners but at least it will help until I can find a better picture. 

We also planted a few more bushes outside my backyard fence.  This will be on the left side of the above picture.  Even though I will not see them much, it will be nice for the neighbors since weeds were just there before.  I will probably get to adding mulch in this area next weekend.  In the below picture you can also see the fence my brother painted.  The fence is probably almost 20 years old but with the solid color stain you would swear it is new.  My brother painted my entire fence in about a day and it took 5 gallon of the stain.  It cost me about $90 after the rebate I got from Home Depot’s 4^th of July sale.  It was a cheap renovation that made a huge difference. 

There is also a picture that shows the large trees in my back yard below.  Most backyard work will not happen until next year but I have completed a few projects.  You can see that my brother and I added landscape lighting to the backyard this weekend.  I bought the spot lights on e-bay for all of the trees so the whole backyard only cost about $200.00 with the 6 post lights I bought at Home Depot. 

I have also included a couple pictures of the things I am growing at my house.  Below you can see all the tomato plants I am growing.  They have gotten huge and they actually all came from seeds.  My brother grew over 200 of them this year and gives them away to friends and neighbors so I took a few off his hands.  Like the front yard, the backyard has a drip watering system so I do not have to hand water anything.  There are even tubes running to the new bushes outside of the fence.  You can also see some of the landscape lighting in this picture.  The trellises are repurposed from the renovation of my apartment complex three years ago.  They were being thrown out about 6 months ago after sitting in storage for two years so I brought them to my place.  They are polywood (plastic composite) so I will never have to paint or replace them.  It adds a nice architectural element. 

 

Lastly, here is a picture of some of the pots I have been growing.  They are starting to fill in nicely and since we have about 10 weeks left of summer they should be huge!

Well that is all for now....the work continues....

The Work Continues.....

Here is just a quick update on the progress of the stone on the columns.  It was a very busy week at work so I did not get as much completed as I had hoped.  Below you can see the stone completed on one column and I have about half of another column completed.  These columns will from here on out be referred to as the “jigsaw puzzle from hell.”  It seems I am always looking for the right stone to fit but they are turning out great.  I hope to get quite a bit done after work this week so hopefully one more column will be done by Friday and I will have more pictures to show.  There will be molding added soon and the wood will be painted white. My brother started sanding the filler this weekend so that is why some posts are white. I also planted another bush this weekend and worked on unpacking since I am still living out of boxes.  More updates coming soon.....

It's Time For Columns!

So this week my brother and I have been very busy working on the exterior of my house.  We added another layer of stone to the top of the wall and also installed the drip sprinkler system for all of the flowers and bushes.  It took four truckloads of dirt to fill in the raised bed.   I also finished adding the landscaping lighting.  Right now there are 6 LED spot lights and 4 halogen lanterns.  Once the halogen bulbs burn out, I will switch them to LED retrofit bulbs to keep the energy cost low.  Below are some pictures of the new columns.  We tore the old railing and columns out and installed the new support posts.  You may see that each column has two posts; but only one of them is load bearing.  The other post stops about six inches below the top of the column box and is just to add to the decorative element.  We still have to add all of the raised moldings to the columns.  I will also be putting new railings back in once the stone is completed.  The old railings had rotted away and were beyond salvageable so they will all be new.

We also started the stone work on the columns.  The boxes on the bottom of the columns are made from exterior sheeting.  There is quite a bit of reinforcement behind the sheeting to help carry all  the weight from all the stone.  We then covered the sheeting in roofing paper (tar paper) and then attached metal lathe to the surface.  This metal allows the mortar on the back of the stone to have something to stick to. 

You can see below that we have a little of the stone on the column bases, but it was late in the day today when we started stone and we wanted to make sure the mortar on the bottom four rows has cured before I add all the weight above.  This is all real stone so it is quite heavy.   I figure it will take at least a week to get all the stone completed since it is really just one huge puzzle to find the right pieces and then the next step will be painting. 

 No pictures to show, but my brother also painted the entire fence in my back yard with a solid color stain.   It really made it look like new but you all will see it in pictures later on.  Well that is all for now.