BurnsFamily Blog

This weekend we completed the landscaping project’s last major construction phase: enclosing the “garden” area next the house, just off the dining room. It looks great! And it feels like we’ve added a new living space to our house. We used to call this our “rose garden” because there were so many roses planted there. Unfortunately, those didn’t survive the remodel, but we plan to plant edibles here: herbs and vegetables.

It was a beautiful weekend to build a fence: not too hot … and with cool, foggy mornings to get started. It took us about a day to build the “bones” for the fence, and a 2nd day to finish all the in-fill boards and trim. We decided to “slack off” and not stain it today.

Here’s some of the early building pictures:

We plan to install a birdbath will be placed here eventually — that’ll be nice to eat breakfast or dinner and watch the several species of birds that hang out here. Several vines and bird- and butterfly-attracting plants will get planted in the next 3 weeks; should be great fun to see what we attract.

Doing the in-fill boards started slowly, then started to move rapidly:

In addition to giving this space a nice, “enclosd and private feel, it is also a new path for visitors to enter our backyard. If you look carefully you’ll notice that the two new fence panels don’t completely block the side yard — they’re staggered so that you can now enter the side yard from the front porch. Coming in this way has a certain sense of drama and intrigue as visitors catch small “glimpses” of what’s in the backyard. We can’t wait to start having parties again and entertaining our friends and neighbors.

Breakfast in the garden, anyone?

Here’s a fun picture, check out the status of the yard on June 16th, 2007: