Custom metal outdoor garden beds, with a bonus babbling fountain

This post is about another of our long-term, seemingly never-ending house and yard projects, custom metal planter beds in the backyard. The difference is, this one is actually done!

There is a reason this project took so long. We put up a nice new garage in 2007, which pretty much demolished the already shameful backyard.  We did a lot of landscaping close to the house in 2008 and 2009, and then in fall and winter of  2009 we built the trellis around what will become our "outdoor room".

It's not quite there yet; it needs "flooring", which I have vowed to do this coming summer.  I really couldn't do it before now because (1) the room needed to be cleared of bricks and boards, which finally happened when we recently completed the reclaimed brick paths around the garden, and (2) the metal planter boxes had not been in.  The planter boxes and fountain were actually completed in the first half of 2014. I just never got around to blogging about them.  So here goes.

Before pictures

This is the space to the side of the garage in October 2013, just as I submitted my hand-sketched plans to a metal shop to build us some shallow planter boxes. The round rocks piled in the center of the flowers are granite cobbles that were on the property when Drew bought it. I had a co-worker drill holes in them the size of a piece of copper pipe I had been hoarding. That's the start of the fountain.

This is the space at the back of the garage where the veggie garden beds will go.

Before the ground froze, I dug down to where the bottom of the metal pieces would go.

Then I covered the space so that snow would not saturate the ground through the first couple of big snow storms while waiting for the metal guys to do their work.

 During

It was January 16, 2014 by the time the pieces were ready and the crew could come out and attach the borders to the concrete foundation of the garage. 

Installed and nearly ready to accept plants in the spring of 2014!

The sprinkler pipe runs under the metal edge into the bed.

I back filled with pea gravel under the metal to provide some drainage.

 

Post-metal installation

May 2014: First garden in the new beds! Peppers did well on this south facing, elevated bed.

I don't have a great picture of the smaller of the two back side boxes, but this one shows the red rock mulch, hose reel stand, and the place for the rain barrel.

So while I had good veggies growing in the big south bed, the side yard, which I wanted to plant with ornamentals to bring us joy when we finally do get to sit in the outdoor room, needed more work.

A blank slate

 A Water Feature

Drew especially wanted a water fountain to bring the soothing sound of flowing water to our urban setting.  I was all on board because, at the time, we had some pretty loud young kids living next door, and I thought the sound would drown them out. Ha ha, get it.

Pre-positioning the fountain

I didn't really follow any specific directions to make the fountain, but I've read probably 30 step-by-step instructions in various home and garden magazines over the past 20 years, so I just combined them.  We decided not to have open water because it can harbor mosquitoes (West Nile Virus!) and I didn't want the cats drinking rotten pond water. Like I said, my co-worker drilled holes in the cobbles for me.  Next, I needed a reservoir and some way to support the very heavy stack of cobbles.

A smallish pond liner was the only thing I could find that was shallow enough and fit in the planter bed.  Then I added concrete blocks and a pump I had from a patio fountain I had made several years ago. 

Wire mesh topped by some sort of plastic coated concrete reinforcement mesh would keep out the pebbles. 

When I put it all together and plugged in the pump, I was delighted to see it worked!

Once that was in, I transplanted the bamboo from another area in the yard and added some blue mondo grass and annuals for color.

 

After pictures

Add the finishing touch of my favorite Mexican beach pebbles and mulch.

A poor panorama picture, but you get the big picture. 

So that was in June, 2014.  The plants are still alive and the pump still works. In the heat of summer, I have to fill the reservoir with the hose for a few minutes each time I plug in the fountain. We don't have it on unless we are in the backyard.  I have to drain the reservoir each winter, which is kind of a pain, but the sound of the fountain is lovely to hear as I work in the garden.  This space is going to be great once we get the patio built around it.

Recycled brick paths

Drew and I built a brick pathway around the back garden area using bricks from the back wall of our house, salvaged (Drew would say, scavenged) during the 2010 addition. It took us over 5 years but it's done now. Here's how.

As readers know, we tore out the back brick wall of our bungalow during the 2010 remodel/addition.  You can see the gory details here, but in case you don't want to relive the horror (and it was horror), here are a few pics from that spring.

The back wall of the house in June 2010 after the contractor lopped off the back shed area. The green bricks on the right were part of a double layer brick wall that would later become the pathways, although I didn't know that was the purpose at the time.

The bricks coming down.

 No wall remains.

The bricks were technically available for reuse in June of 2010, however, we were a little busy with that other project for about a year.  It continues still, but nevertheless, important yard projects need to be done.  Fast forward to June of 2014, after moving the piles of bricks from the pergola to the narrow breezeway between the vinyl fence and the garage back to the pergola again, I finally started to clean the bricks of mortar so they could be reused for the pathway around the vegetable garden.

This was my cleaning station.  I can't believe there isn't a beer bottle in this picture. I drank a lot of beer while sitting there, chiseling mortar off the bricks, listening to podcasts on my headphones.

Piles of clean bricks. I probably spent about 40 hours cleaning bricks. 

Once I had enough bricks to get me going, and I had the pathways all graded out the way I wanted them (no small feat!) I started laying bricks. August 14, 2014 was an exciting project day.

8/14/14 The first flight of bricks that I laid. I leveled the soil under the paths, then leveled and tamped 1-2 inches of sand, then pounded stakes in to anchor the plastic edging, before laying an alternating pattern of bricks. I used screws for spacers.

8/20/2014. Coming along.

11/30/2014. I laid about 20 to 25 feet of pathway before winter last year, making it almost to the compost bins so we would have a walkway to tread upon to take out the compost.

Things picked up again last spring. Drew got involved in the project once he found out power tools were involved.  We had a system where I would lay out the pattern and mark the bricks that needed to be cut, and he would do the dirty work cutting them with a masonry blade on the circular saw.  

Spring and summer 2015's work.  The corners were tricky, but Drew helped by doing most of the cutting and schlepping bricks.

By late summer, the easy straight run next to the vinyl fence was done and I came to another tricky part. I had to build a "retaining wall" under the ally fence to keep the bricks in the yard plus figure out how to leave open the escape route the cats like to use to get to the ally.

10/16/2015. Here come the bricks from the left. What a mess.

10/16/2015 Looking out from the yard.

10/17/2015. A good day's work.  The escape route for the cats is in the foreground and the gate to the alley is to the upper right.

Close up of the escape dugout for the cats.  They like to run wild back in the alley, and it would be difficult for them to get over the 6-foot vinyl fence, so I terraced the bricks just enough that they can squeeze through on their bellies.

Looking down from the top of the fence to the very large and extremely heavy rock Drew dug in to the alley as a "landing pad" for the cats to slither onto from the escape dugout.

11/17/2015. A few more days of bricklaying got me to this point.

But is was after this that I realized I didn't have enough bricks from the remodel to finish the project.  So, in true Lucy fashion, I ripped up the mini patio I had laid for the garbage cans back in Fall 2011, 

which had been my "permanent" solution to the temporary flagstone mini patio I created in 2008.

   

So now I had enough reused bricks to reuse again, but then another difficult area, which included 1) turning a corner and joining the path back to where I started, 2) widening to extend to the pergola exit, and 3) adding a rock under the downspout.

The final push.

I carried on, racing against shorter and shorter days while doing a lot of field work for work, until finally on Nov 22, with Drew's help, we finished.
 

11/22/2015: ALL DONE!  It was so cold our fingers were numb and mine were cracked and bleeding from a long weekend of brick work, but a big storm was in the near forecast so we hammered it out until 7 PM on a Sunday night.

What a feeling of accomplishment!  This project, which I started planning and pondering in 2010 to "save money" and use a recycled product instead of buying new, took me countless hours and put a serious tight spot in my hamstring that I still feel today.  But I really love the character the paths give to the garden, and they make it so easy to get my wheel barrel and garden implements around the main bed.  Here are a couple of "after" pictures.

 

And we finished none too soon, for the snow came with a vengeance in the next few weeks.

12/16/2015

 

But what about the poor transient trash cans?  Well, I rounded up some rectangular concrete pavers we had in the yard from various other projects (in my pack rat midden), bought some new red ones, and voila! An even, level checkerboard mini patio for the trash cans.  I hope this is their last resting spot. 

 

Covers for our air condensor units

In this post I told about how we installed a French drain and rebuilt the retaining wall on our side yard.  Here is a picture of last spring's work.

the side year in 2013

 This winter, Drew got busy and made some covers for those mini split (air conditioner) units you can see in the picture.  They needed covers because icicles could fall on them and replacement would be a big pain. Protect your investment.

Drew is quite handy!

The Inn is open: our new guest room

I redecorated the guest room.  Or maybe I should say decorated the guest room, since when I moved in in 2005 the room was a cross between "1960s-old-lady" and "bachelor".

Nice border. Made me feel like I was staying at Grandma's.

white on white - not my choice of cheerful. The Navy memorabilia was not making the room "pop".

As this was the larger of the two bedrooms in this house, it was our master bedroom, so we wanted to make it nice.  The first step was to rip out the teal green carpet.

Then we remodeled the adjacent bathroom, so we moved the closet from one wall to another and closed in the second doorway into this tiny bedroom.

And painted a lovely shade of blue. At least it looked lovely in the magazine ad for Benjamin Moore paint.  When we got it on the walls, though, it was like sleeping inside a bottle of Febreeze.

Then there was the interim weird ugly furniture phase.

Before simply getting rid of the headboard all together and buying some bedding I liked.

But the room was pretty bad.

TV trays made very functional bedside tables for 4 years.

And that was our newlywed bedroom for the first 4 years of marriage.  We just turned off the lights.

Then a couple of years ago we put the giant addition on the house and moved out of this room to our new master suite.  Since then, it has been an unwelcoming guest room.  I must say I am sorry to those of you who stayed with us and had to sleep in this room.  You must have felt like you were in a construction zone.

So this summer I got some gumption to fix it.

The trim was in very bad shape.  There was talk of stripping it all down to wood and refinishing it, but I needed to see an end to this project.  I decided to paint the trim white., but it took a ton of scraping, Bondo, and caulking to get it paint ready.

 First step in the makeover was a headboard I made out of an old door.

raw materials

I cut it to queen-sized width and made a cleat for the top and braces for the side.

There was some piecing to do.

But it looked better once I added re-purposed trim as a top ledge, Bondo-ed the knob holes, and primed it.

I found some miss matched furniture that I liked at a second hand store and gave them all a fresh coat of white.

 Time for some hard core painting.

But what color?

Upon closer inspection of the floor, I could see that long ago it had been painted faux oak.  That was common in the early days here in Utah.

Now I was doing my own artistic painting.

We settled on a beautiful shade of blue that makes the room calming and cool.

After paint, some lush carpet.

Cream Berber with a faint yellow tint.

We had the heater vent stripped of paint and Drew shined it up.

And the doors would be refinished by Drew.

 So the only thing left was to decorate!

Fresh bedding.

Re-purposed windows for wall art.  The center one is the screen from our front windows I found in the attic.

Heavy purple velvet drapes to shut out the sun for mid-day napping.

And the headboard turned out great.

 So the guest room is open for visitors.  In fact, our first house guest, my cousin Ruth the Artist from Oregon, has come and gone and she reportedly slept comfortably and well.  She loved our guest room so much she gave me an original painting of hers.

So if you ever find yourself in Salt Lake City, you have a place to lay your head.

Update January 2014: Finishing art

One winter day I finally filled in the re-purposed wall art, i.e. the old screen and window pictured above.  When I was helping mom pack to move out of the farmhouse years ago, I found a box of postcards.  Most of them were not written on, but a few were, and all were vintage. I strung them up and hung them in the vintage frames. How vintage of me.

Vintage family postcards in window and window screen "frames".

Most of the postcards were circa 1930-40, purchased when my grandparents when on a trip to California to send back home to my great grandparents.  One that went through the mail is dated 1932.

Some of the pictures on the fronts are cool.

The caption on this one says Arrow Rock Dam, Boise, Idaho. Highest in the world, Height 351 ft., length 1,060 ft.  The postmark on the back is dated July 1932 and was sent for a penny.  The Bureau of Reclamation website says this dam was built in 1915 and it is still operating today.

The caption for this one says "Lowering loaded box car, Boulder Dam", which shows the date of the postcard as between 1933 and 1935 when it was being built and before it was renamed Hoover Dam, as we know it today. This dam is 726 feet tall, much taller than its earlier cousin.

 As cool as the fronts are, the back is where the good nuggets are. Sadly, only a few are written on.

I smudged the addressee, but I will tell you that they were addressed to my great grandmother with my hometown and state only; no PO Box or street address and no zip. Fantastic.

Two were sent from my grandma and grandpa to my great grandma and grandpa in February 1944 while they were on vacation to California.

See below for translation 

The one in the photo above reads

Dear Folks - Everything is beautiful out here. We are at Lea's ????? swing the town. Were at the ?Txocoder? - that's where you were - but we only saw one movie star & he needed a haircut. Love #####

How precious is that!  Another is great because it was sent in 1944 when they passed through Salt Lake City.  It reads:

Dear Folks, We are in Salt Lake tonight - winter here. First waves struck - no trouble - lots of traffic. Hard to get rooms. Love a ?tor???? cabin tonight. Having FUN

Apparently, neither the traffic nor the weather has changed in Salt Lake City in 70 years!

What I really wonder is why were my grandparents on a vacation in the winter of 1944 while WWII was going on? 

Anyway, if you come to visit, you will get to sleep with some pieces of history here.