Garden Fence

As I mentioned in my previous post, we hadn't planned on doing much work to the garden other than paving it with old brick. The collapse of the 3 foot high retaining wall changed all of that. The rebuilt retaining wall seen in the picture below is now complete other than the fact that it still needs to be skimmed with concrete. This new wall was an excuse to build a new fence at the back of our house. This redwood fence (6x8 feet) was purchase at Lowes for $91 a panel; it is secured to 4x4 redwood posts that are anchored to metal straps that are embedded in the concrete. The caps on top of the posts are accented in copper.

Work On The Garden

The concrete retaining wall you see being built in this picture was not planned. The 3 foot high retaining wall collapsed the other day. We needed to do something urgently because it partly supported the back of our cottage behind out house (the rear of it is seen in this picture). Have you ever tried to get home depot to deliver 3 pallets of concrete mix together with rebar on the same day? I thought it would be a long shot but they came through like champs! The builders promptly poured a one foot deep concrete footing, let it dry and then started laying the concrete brick on top of it, threaded though the rebar that was poured with the footing. Once this dries, concrete will be pured inside of the hollow concrete bricks to form a very strong 3 foot wall. Once all of this is complete, we'll repave the garden using the salvage bricks we saved from our old kitchen chimney stack and leave a 2 foot wide trench along the concrete wall to fill with soil for a small garden. All of this is expected to be done in about another week.

We're Done Inside (for now)!

Sorry for the delay in posting to my blog. I've been busy getting the finishing touches of the house ready for us to move in. All in all, it took about 3 weeks to get the inside of the house painted. We went for Benjamin Moore Ironclad Oil paint for all of the doors and trim -- we really like the look... really thick paint with a satin finish and no signs of any brush marks (it was sprayed on); for the wall we used Benjamin Moore latex paint. The primer for everything was Zinsser Cover Stain (oil based). We bought the lighting fixtures off of eBay; all except for the three pendants in the hall are refurbished old oil gas chandeliers. As you can see from the photos we are really using the picture rail molding; I made sure that the builders nailed the 2 inch nails into the studs so they could hold the weight of some of our pictures (the heaviest of which is 30lbs). In the kitchen, all of the appliances are Bosch except for the refrigerator which is an LG cabinet depth french door model. The kitchen cabinets are Ikea Adel Medium Brown, the counter tops are Blue Pearl Granite and the backsplash is a marble mosaic which I think ties the colors of the cabinets, the counters and the walls together well. The folding doors in front of the washer and dryer were original panel doors to the house that were cut in two. I'm very pleased how this worked out. The floors throughout the first floor are floating BR-1111 engineered Tigerwood floors (which I installed over a week). We needed to use engineered flooring because of the radiant heat; we went the floating method because of the concrete slab. They look great, however, I'm not a big fan of engineered floors (they are too soft and damage easily). In hindsight I wish I had gone with quartersawn white oak solid flooring. I understand that this wood is very stable and would have worked well with our radiant system. Oh well... you live and learn. The first floor is now done and we still have 2 more floors of the house to finish but for the time being we're done inside of the house.