Backyard Projects Part 1

So we have a pretty long list of the things going on around here right now. In-between the indoor projects we're working on, we have multiple backyard projects on the go. I actually have a chalkboard in our office with all of the projects listed...yet it doesn't seem that I'm crossing a lot of them off lately. Every time Ian suggests another project, I point to that chalkboard and that pretty much ends the conversation...I think we often forgot how many things we have on the list.

Here's a quick run-through of what we're in the middle of right now:

To Do:

- Finishing the floors upstairs (hallway and all 3 bedrooms)
- Fill nail holes and paint all baseboards in 3 bedrooms after floors are installed
- Caulk all baseboards in 3 bedrooms after floors are installed
- Install nursery closet system
- Put together crib
- Put together nursery dresser/change table
- Put up blinds, curtains, photo frames, mobile and all other nursery accessories
- Sew crib skirt
- Create and paint change pad table topper
- Finish painting and sealing knobs for dresser/change table
- Finish buying major nursery purchases
- Fix all electrical/switches in house
- Finish putting plates and new switches around house
- Finish sanding and staining wood floor transition pieces
- Finish building up stairway posts
- Re-paint stairway railings
- Fix stone pathway and seal stones
- Plant tree and bushes in large back garden
- Plant flowers and bushes in smaller back gardens
- Seal deck
- Put up solar shade and patio furniture
- Prepare pool for use
- Finish mouldings in master bedroom
- Create roman shade for kids bathroom
- Put up mudroom light
- Put up new side porch light
- Fix up front garden (postpone to next year)
- Re-build pool deck (postpone to next year)


Completed:

- Finish privacy fence
- Rip out old plants/bushes in backyard
- Level and rebuild back garden
- Plant clematis in front of privacy fence
- Move side gate up to house
- Complete sod
- Build air conditioner sound wall
- Prepare deck for sealant
- Paint nursery
- Paint middle bedroom
- Put up nursery light

Ok that makes me tired just looking at it all! So obviously we'll blog about these things as we finish, but we have about 2.5 months to finish it all before baby arrives, so we'll see how that goes :) To keep us on track, I've posted this list on the right hand side of our menu bar of the website...now we have each other AND all of you to keep us on our toes!

So back to the backyard projects. We managed to knock 3 of them off the list this past weekend (despite the flooring mishap we had last week that I'll blog about later on), so we were pretty happy with that.

We finished the privacy fence, moved the side gate up and sodded the lawn and built the air conditioner sound wall. When I say "we" for these particular projects, I say that lightly. Most of this was Ian. I mean, I was helping...however its getting harder and harder for me to help with these projects as I get more and more pregnant, so the easy things like watering the sod, carrying back plants, etc., become my job.

So lets talk privacy fence first, shall we? We actually built this fence last year and decided to stain the deck and privacy fence as well. Finding stain was a big challenge for us last year but after 5 attempts, we did purchase a stain that we thought we liked. Since we couldn't seem to find a long period of time when it wasn't raining, we figured we'd start with staining the lattice in the privacy fence. We ended up deciding to leave the deck staining until this year and in the process made the decision to just leave the deck natural. Back to square one. So, since we were leaving the deck natural, we needed to replace the stained lattice in the privacy fence (so everything looks consistent).

Here's the fence last year:

 

then we stained it....

 

Then we decided to "un"-stain it....i.e. rebuild it;

 

 

The process for building this fence the first time around, began with 2 posts dug into the ground and cemented in. We hired someone to come by and do this for us, so they actually dug 3 holes and put in 3 posts for us. 2 posts were used for the privacy fence, and 1 was used for the air conditioner sound fence. Once the posts were finished, Ian built the rest of the frame (we actually measured how big we wanted this fence to be first and that determined where the post guys dug their holes):

We installed the top piece of the frame and then measured the distance from the ground to the top. We divided that number in half and cut 2 pieces of lattice to that size. Ian then installed a middle piece of wood to support the top lattice and to help give more support to the frame. Always level as you go...very important part or you'll end up with a lopsided privacy fence!

Next step was to install the first piece of lattice:

 Finally the second piece:

and you're done!

 

So this year, the only thing that had to be done, was to remove the top finishing piece, unscrew the old lattice and insert the new pieces. It didn't take us as long since the frame was already in place. Since taking this photo yesterday, we've planted 2 clematis that will hopefully grow up the fence over time and give us some additional privacy. So privacy fence- done!

We also completed the sound wall for the air conditioner. As I mentioned above, when Ian had the guys dig the holes for the privacy fence, he had them dig one post for the air conditioner sound wall. This wall goes directly from the side of the house into the post, so we really only needed that one post dug into the ground.

Before the post was dug into the ground, we started off with this:

We basically re-did the gardens around the backyard this year, so we didn't need to remove any plants or work around much.

From that point, Ian was able to install the second post against the house and then attach the middle and bottom bracing pieces:

The boards were each attached to fill in the frame and finally the top piece to finish it off. It already makes a big difference visually and will be nice when we are sitting on the deck to mask some of the sound from the AC unit:

Lastly, we moved the fence gate up and sodded behind it. Almost 2 years ago, Ian decided to rebuild our side gate. We have 2 side gates, however the one side mainly acts as an access to the pool shed. When Ian rebuilt the gate, he kept it in the same place it had originally been, which was a good distance away from the pool shed. However, this left us with a large area of ground that either needed to be filled in with patio stones or grass. If we chose grass, he'd have to open the gate to mow it, which was a pain. The solution? To move the gate closer to the end of the house/edge of the patio stone. This would still allow us to lay sod, but on the OUTSIDE of the fence, for easy access with mowing.

Ian basically disassembled the gates and reinstalled them against the patio stone:

From this picture you can tell where the gate used to be- basically where the dirt begins:

Now that we had moved the gate up, we needed to sod the large area of dirt. Ian had a summer job laying sod once, so it tends to be a pretty quick process around here. In 10 minutes we had gone from the picture above to this:

It definitely looks much better and will be a lot easier to maintain.

So that's what kept us busy this weekend! Not a huge dent into our list of projects, but I'd say we're on our way.

Have any of you been working on backyard projects lately?!

Melissa and Ian

Like a Rock

Hi Friends!

Dont worry we haven't forgotten about you :) We've actually been quite busy with work and a few other things lately and have to deal with some unfortunate family things this week, but we'll be back next week sharing some projects and "How To's" with you all :)

I wanted to show you how far we've come with our patio beside our deck. Ian worked many many hours on this, and Im happy to say its finally done!

Let me remind you of the before:

and after many hours of carrying INSANELY heavy rocks back and forth from the car to the backyard, hours of cutting and levelling and and only a few injuries, here's the after:

Ya, can you see Ian poking out beside the house on the left? Oh wait, I'm sorry, you're probably focused on the MASSIVE DUST CLOUD that filled our backyard while Ian cut the rocks/stones. Even his eyelashes were white.

However, it looks pretty good doesn't it? :)

I love the side-by-side comparison:

So its much cleaner, the space is much more usable and once the deck and shed are stained/painted it will allllll match. Finally :D Im excited for that. We'll be posting on the process we went through to get to the final patio reveal, next week.

p.s LOVED reading all of your comments on our last post....TGIF really WAS the best, wasn't it!?  :)

The jungle has been TAMED

Happy Friday Everyone! I hope you all have great plans for the weekend. Lets be honest, who doesn't live for weekends during the summer?! We're still spending our weekends working away on our backyard jungle, however some spaces look more like a desert now... Its odd to think we went from this madness:

 

To this vast open space:

The ground has actually all been levelled and our next step is to lay patio stones. Ian also sealed up the side of the deck and included a little door in order to access underneath. You know, for when we need to play hide and go seek. Seriously though, it allows us to store wood and other things under there.

So much better:

Melissa and Ian-  1, Jungle - 0.

However, our taming was not complete. We also had the sides of the house to contend with.  Remember this?

Yikes. This was not the only jungle let me remind you. We have many. I mean can you IMAGINE what was living in our backyard? Well, let me tell you. Multiple bunny families, the usual chipmunks and squirrels, the odd raccoon and a family of turkeys. Heck, I wouldn't blame them. Who would ever find you in THAT? That, plus all of the other former jungle options in our backyard for homes. Its like a freaking palace back here. They even have a pool to bathe in. If I was an animal I'd live here. Well, not anymore...now they can all live under the deck- they pretty much have their own door in and out of it now :S

So we cleaned up the other jungles, working on one at a time...we needed to pace ourselves with this! We started with the biggest one by first clearing it out:

Then we removed all the weeds, and raked the dirt to break it up and level it out. We then moved a FEW plants (hostas since they require minimal maintenance and look nice) that we had in other gardens and  actually wanted to keep, over to this garden and mulched around them:

We wanted to make the gardens smaller and more manageable so we laid sod. The dry, dry sod. Just a tip when you are laying sod. Its best if you can do it at night or when the sun isn't as strong. Make sure you water the ground BEFORE you lay the sod down, and I also like to water the bottom of each piece of sod before laying it. Lay your sod, and then water generously. You should water it every day (unless it rains) to ensure that its getting the water it needs to root itself into the ground. Also, if you are planning on laying a lot of sod in a large area, make sure to stagger the pieces. Sound as if I know a lot about sod? Well Ian taught me all I know- he actully laid sod for a summer job once and said it was the worst job ever. However, I thought it had its perks: not only do we know ALL about sod now, but Ian was super muscular and tanned all summer because of it, so I personally thought it was an excellent work experience ;)

Anyho, here's the sod after about a week. We watered it every day. Notice how green the new sod is? Ya, thats because its been somewhat dry here this summer so we hadn't been doing the best job at watering all of the other lawn. Our bad.

We did the same to the other gardens behind this one, they just need to be finished off with some mulch:

We're actually going to have a privacy screen installed on this side of the deck to block our lovely neighbours from listening to our late night Settlers tournaments and to spare them from seeing us in bathings suits on tanning days...

So now that we've got the gardens mainly cleared out, we'll begin to plant in the next few months.

This backyard has pretty much consumed us, but its definitely coming together.

Have any of you been working on your yards? What flowers would you plant in a garden?



Eat my (saw)dust

At least thats what I said to the massive hornets that have been hanging out in our pool shed for the past few seasons. Not cool.

There are a few (well probably more than a few but I'll spare you) odd things about me...one of them is I am horribly afraid of bees. Im pretty sure its a phobia. When they are around me, or I even hear a slight "buzzing" sound, I actually freak out. Ian was away on business a while back, and I noticed a wasp flying around our house (my phobia also includes wasps, hornets, really any kind of buzzing flying insect with a stinger) and I actually had a panic attack. Crying, difficultly breathing...it was ridiculous...as in me, Im ridiculous. I do recognize Im a little crazy, but hey, we all have fears right? Mine is bees. There you go.

So Ian discovered a hornets nest in our shed, and we (well actually Ian) decided it was a good time to clean it out (since I ran screaming to the hills) and re-do the inside.

The shed previously looked like this:

Its a bit bright in that photo, but our next step will be actually painting the outside of the shed to match our deck (which we plan to stain the same colour).

So here's what the inside of the shed looked like to begin with. Are you counting yet? Have you noticed have many rooms in this house were yellow when we moved in? Other than the obvious red, green, neon blue, pink, etc, yellow was a favorite of the previous homeowners. Dont get us wrong, we dont MIND yellow, but this shed needed a facelift.

So step 1, was to paint the inside. We chose white (surprise, surprise!). Not because we love white and want to paint everything that colour, but because we looked at our paint cans in the basement and noticed we had a lot of primer sitting around. So white primer it is!

It took Ian about 2 hours to paint it, and the walls were dry before he finished the door. The 37 degree weather may have had something to do with that.

Last step was the door. Yep, thats REALLY white.

Once we paint the outside of the shed a light grey (with navy trim) it might match a little better. Regardless, I wasn't willing to sit inside a boiling hot shed for 2 hours to paint it, so it was Ian's colour choice on this one.

After we finished the painting, we installed a tall laundry cabinet beside the door. I got right into organizing that (my favorite part!! eee!!) and it can now store all of our pool supplies and other chemicals we keep hanging around for the pool.

Our next step was to build a bench that could store all of our patio furniture cushions. We had seen a bunch of those nice storage boxes at Home Depot, Lowes, etc, but since we had the space in the shed, we figured why not save the space on our deck and keep it out of sight. So we built one. Correction- Ian built and I supervised. Im good at that.

Before anything, we measured the wall and factored in, the size of the bench, place space for the lid to open and space above for the cabinets we wanted to install.

Then we started to build. First, we built two identical box frames.  Then we attached the back and one side of the frames to the actual wall of the shed because we know the shed is not level (most things in this house aren't...we've learnt that the hard way).

If you’re just building a box to sit on the floor then cut 4 identical supports and attach them in the corners to tie the frames together, you can see we added in supports to the front corners and middle to strengthen the frame. To avoid having to cut the wainscoting we just made the box the same height, still making sure the measurements worked- we put the cushions inside the frame to ensure it was tall enough. We then double checked to make sure the lid would open with enough space. LOTS of measurements!

We attached the bottom frame first, using shims to level because not all floors are created level! The walls are plywood, so we didn’t need drywall anchors. Once the bottom frame was level and screwed to the wall we leveled and attached it to the upper frame, followed by adding the supports to the front corners and middle, to keep the top frame from pulling off the wall from the weight of the lid or someone leaning on it.

Now let’s hide that frame!  We used a 3” wainscoting (bead board) in 36” X 32” sheets and 1” finishing nails to tack it to the frame. We put the first nail in a corner then leveled the sheet to the top of the frame and tacked the opposite corner. You want to make sure the sheet is level otherwise your box will look like it’s leaning. For the trim we used a 3” high trim with a square edge for a simple look and 2” finishing nails. Since it’s hiding in our pool house we just used butt joints but if it was somewhere we’re going to see it frequently we would have cut the joints on 45 degree angles to give it a cleaner look.

After we had trimmed it out, we filled the gaps with caulking and gave it all a coat of white paint.

The wainscoting and trim added almost ¾” to the frame, so it’s a good idea to wait until it’s assembled before cutting the piece for the lid. Attach the hinges to the lid then attach the hinges to the frame, then you're done!

So while Ian did all the hard work, I was working on building the cabinets to go above the bench. We actually got a great deal on these. They are just simple laundry room cabinets that you can get at any hardware store, but we got them on sale last weekend at Canadian Tire for 40% off. So $39.99 seemed like a good deal to us.

I put the cabinet together on our kitchen floor (which was actually a bit of a pain, since there really isn't a lot of space in there...) but it took me about 30 mins and I was done. Did you notice my floral hammer? It came as a part of a tool set. I found the set on clearance at HomeSense for like $7, and thought, what girl doesn't need her OWN tool set? Plus, its so obvious now which hammer is mine. Ian refuses to use them. I would like to say its because he thinks they're just too girly, but its actually because they PROBABLY aren't the best quality tools in the world. Whatevs. I say a hammer's a hammer!

After I had my frame put together, I installed that onto the wall using wall plugs and screws.

Then it was time to attach the doors. Ian snapped this pic of me as it seems I never have any pictures of me working on anything....hmmm. Honestly though, its not easy to take a photo of yourself painting a wall. That's my story and Im sticking to it. (p.s did you notice that I am actually IN the shed? That was a big step for me people...anywhere hornets live is not a place I want to be).

Once the doors were up, we were almost finished! We just need to put a few hooks up on the walls for hanging, a few baskets in for towels and we are done! Me being picky, I also want to change all the handles on the cabinets to match....just for my own piece of mind people. I know its not a show room, but I will know.

There isn't much we can do on the other side of the pool shed, since thats where all the "pool equipment" is, so its just this one side we had to work with and create a more organized space.

So lets look at the before and afters (still in progress)....

SO much better. Plus, the best part?! The hornets, wasps, bees, etc are ALL gone. I think I had Ian spray a full can of raid before I would even step foot in there, so we are all good to go :)

We'll post a picture once its all done, but do you think Im crazy for wanting to put a BIT of decor in there? Something nautical themed?! What would you do?