Covered Greenhouse Garden

While we're waiting for our fence to suntan before we stain it, I took on another outdoor project this weekend.

Yep, it's Garden 2013! And there's a reason for the Oregon Trail look, I promise. Since we've moved here, we've had some windy nights and some CRAZY 30 mph windy nights. On top of that, the neighbors all comment on the foggy summers. So to help my future tomatoes out, I decided to build them a little green house to protect them from the wind and to elevate the temperature during the colder days. This should also help me with the "year round" gardening Bay Area people seem so keen on.

Dog Run Part 2: It's Panel Time

Catch up with Part 1 of the dog run series!

We last left off with our three posts in the ground and ready for some slat/board/panel things. Before we even started this whole mess, however, we did a little research. Here are some designs we were drawn to.

We really liked the modern look of the horizontal boards and the varied widths, so we came up with our own design based on the inspiration. (This is what I look like with no makeup on)

We had some trouble finding the boards at the big-box stores (they only had 6-foot lengths with rounded tops), but luckily we stumbled across a local lumberyard called South City Lumber & Supply which had exactly what we needed in 16-foot lengths (we had them cut to 8 feet since that's what our cars will fit).

Dog Run Part 1: A Post About Posts

It's been crazy here at the new house. Lots of unpacking (sadly yes, we're still partially in boxes), settling and more unpacking. We've been slow to tackle any big projects since we want to live in the house for a few months before deciding what it needs. One thing that HAD to be done, however, and that was a dog run for the pups. We had hoped it would take us 3, maybe 4 weekends max, but the project has stretched out to a grand total of 7 weekends over the course of two months. And we're still not done.

As I mentioned in my house introduction post, our yard is dirt. Just all dirt in all the places. You can imagine the dogs are really into this because every time we let them out into the yard, they end up something like:

And:

You can maybe see how this was not really working for us. So we decided to turn the small patch of yard at the side of the house into a low-maintenance, snazzy-looking, fenced-in dog relief area as our first official HOUSE PROJECT.