The Nest's Backyard Transformation

Our Transformation Of The Nest's Back Yard - A New Fence

When we first moved in, the back yard was pretty much nothing but dirt, covered by leaves, enclosed by a dillapitated fence. That is all that separates our yard from our neighbor's yard, and our dog from hers. Along the back fence, in somewhat better shape, stands of bamboo in both corners. Not the good kind of bamboo, but the invasive kind that's hard to control, and even harder to get rid of. The carriage house and a four foot tall, fairly new fence divides the yard from the driveway. A gate by the back door allows access outside of the yard. It is almost totally shaded by four tall oak trees, two along the old fence, and two along the new fence.

We get to know our neighbors on both sides fairly well. Pam shares the dillapitated fence with us. Our driveway and Dave and Rebecca's adjoin a row of four tall camphor trees, shared between us. In the back, by our gate, is an open area between the two driveways. We like to hang out in the back yard, but the more we do, the more we realize the fence is going to need replaced, and very soon. We talk about what it will take to do it and how we're going to do it. I don't know if Pam overheard us talking about it from time to time, or if the hole in the fence where the two dogs liked to stand and bark and growl at each other back and forth was the deciding factor, but as we're talking to Pam and watching it happen we get to talking about the fence. She offers to split the cost with us. We tell her we're planning on replacing it ourselves, not have a professional do it, and she says it's fine.

More Improvements...

(March 2015)
We're in the midst of replacing the fence in the backyard between us and our neighbor Pam. It's a lot of work and before we can get to the back part of the fence we need to get rid of the bamboo stand first. That's more work than all the fence combined... At least it seems that way. I start by just cutting out what's in the way with the chain saw, but it leaves a big pile of bamboo stalks lying in the yard, piled up along the new fence. Ann and Nick are cutting and bundling that up. Not to mention the dozens and dozens of little round stumps, dangerous and painful to walk on. I'll have to chop those out later. It's good enough for now, but they will have to go, or the bamboo will just grow right back.

Then the old fence panels had to come down and any rotted posts replaced. I wanted to go panel by panel but Ann and Nick already had half the fence down before I made it to the trees from the starting point between the two houses. That's alright, I can't complain about things getting done, but of course I still do. That's alright. I'll just unstack them later and break them down into the slats and the stringers, trying to keep track of the sharps so Maya doesn't end up with a staple in her foot. Ann and Nick by stacking the worst with the worst and the better by themselves. I ended up with quite a stack of needs more attention.

The posts are going in slowly, mainly around the trees since the tree has grown around one of the old ones and the other rotted away.There's no way I can even get the post hole digger in the ground anywhere around the trunk itself where it's been swallowed up, so I try to find a place on either end where the roots let me go down as far as we need to, and we'll just do the best we can a bit further back from the trunk. I'm not able to go down as far on that one, so decide to use the "swallowed" post to brace the new shallow one. This will make it easier, so we ask Pam if she minds if we go a little further into her yard than it used to. Basically box around the trees a little more into her yard and not quite a half panel longer. She's fine with it, so that's what we're doing.

It slows me down some having to measure and cut and think about how everything needs to go together, staggering posts on either side as make sense to be ablr to screw on the next panel. We get a bit further down the line from the trees before we have to knock off for the day. We'll have to take Maya out on a lead, but at least she can go out. The next morning we're back at it. Before we get very far, we're to the next rotted post, which has broken off below the ground and we can't get it out, even by digging around it. It's in there! We just put one in next to it knowing the line is already a bit crooked, but at least the new panels are going up. It kind of sucks that the whole time I can't get into the garage, short of walking through the gate in the fence on the other side of the yard then walking up and opening the carriage doors.

We struggle to get that last panel in where we had to cut out the bamboo. I chop out any of the bamboo roots that are still in the way, leaving just the golden rain tree root. We don't want to harm that since we're hoping that its roots will choke out any bamboo we may have missed. It sits about a ½" taller than the panel next to it when it's level, so that will have to be good enough. The only other preparation necessary is adding a cleat to the back corner of the back fence to hold the new panel in place on that end, where I don't even want to think about having to put in a new post. Most of the thickest bamboo is right in the way and we already have a yard full of bamboo...

And now I have a large stack of old fence panels, in varying stages of decay, to dispose of. When I say dispose of, I mean break down into slats and sringers, keeping track of the sharps so Maya doesn't end up with a staple in her foot. It takes me a few weekends, and quite a few trips to the recycling bin with all the metal that builds up in the coffe cans from tearing these old panels apart. Some of them just fall apart. Some of them are almost new. I save the better pieces of the old fence to use as raw material for making trestles and bridges for the garden scale railroad. But if this experience teaches me anything, it's that we need a door from the garage to the backyard. And that the carriage doors need replaced. And soon. Very soon.

More Enjoyments...

(May 2015)
Long story short, the old fence comes down and the new one goes up in a weekend, but the work continues well beyond that weekend. Nick and Ann score an inflatable swimming pool at Wally World, and a big one at that! They set it up in the backyard on a tarp, with another tarp acting as a barrier between the dirt that is our back yard and the pool. Nick gets an upgraded pump and filter from amazon and the pool is open for the summer. We even have "floaty chairs" to just lay back and relax in. And relax we do. And we can because the bamboo roots never grew back. The roots of the golden rain tree coupled with the shade must have tipped the balance in our favor.

(June 2015)
So the next big thing is the table saw. It's gotten way too hot and humid to do much outside during the day, so unless it really needs done right now, it can wait until later in the evening or earlier the next morning. Doesn't seem to matter though, I'm still drenched in sweat in no time at all. Also doing so while taking out more bamboo in the other corner of the back fence. So much bamboo, it falls across the yard from one side to the other in a huge pile. I don't even want to think about cutting that down to 4' and bundling. Not until it's had some time to dry out. Plus with the new boat Ann and Nick bought, we've had more play than work for a bit.

We put the shed in sometime after that. Ann wanted it behind the carriage house but having just finished getting rid of the rest of the bamboo from replacing the fence, I didn't even want to thnk about taking out the bamboo in the other corner and having to repair or replace that section of fence too. It was quicker and easier at the time to just set it up between the big oak tree and the back corner of the house. Eventually I did manage to get that other stand of bamboo cut down though, around the end of June, and it exposed the fence in need of repair. I have a new panel and an almost new panel to replace the really bad sections with. But that's not the holdup...

It also left us with another HUGE pile of bamboo to dispose of. When I say dispose of, I mean cut into four foot lengths, bundle, and put out to the curb for yard trash pickup. That dispose of didn't happen, at least, not all at once, and not completely. I ended up piling what was left against the back fence, and there it sat for over a year. There were more pressing matters than cleaning out the rest of the bamboo and fixing the fence. I fought with it to keep it from growing back. And fought with it. And fought with it. We enjoyed the back yard as much as we could with all that dirt, but even after several attempts to make it a place to relax, it wasn't. We had to do something to cover that dirt. Eventually the part of the yard that didn't get much shade started turning green, albeit more with weeds than anything else.

Armed with all this leftover scrap wood and a new table saw, I became a garden scale modelling fiend! I started by trying my hand at making trestle bents. My first attempts at making templates for building these things only served to demonstrate their shortcomings. Eventually I remade them as something more usefull and was able to build a four foot long Howe truss bridge, along with a pair of trestle approaches, each 16" long - a span of nearly seven feet - and all made from scrap wood from the old fence! I was hoping to have it all up and running by Christmas, but that didn't happen. You can read more about that here too.

I started the side porch about the same time as completing the bridge, around November 2015. Ann's Christmas present was having the outside finished with new screen door and windows installed. We also finally dressed the electric in through the wall right at Thanksgiving, 11/24/2015. Guess until that was done, couldn't really think about finishing the inside, although the outside is still the concern for now. I had actually finished the bridge around my birthday in January of 2016. That's as far as I got because once again, other things more important. In our case, remodelling the bathroom, meaning totally demolish then rebuild the entire floor, four walls, and plaster ceiling. New plumbing, new fixtures, new tile. So at least six months of having the house in some state of "torn up".

Not much else got done in the back yard until we decided to have the trees cut down (at the end of that six months). The garden railroad would have to come back out. Then the concern was the shed and whether it would be in the way. Thinking it would be in the way and would need to move behind the garage, but I'll save all of that for the next section...