Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Walls!

This post is not about any adventure or travel or musical experience. I'm writing about the sort of thing that would make us roll our eyes when we were 20. A house project.

I haven't done much to my house since buying it last summer, but I recently became fascinated with the notion of having a wall built in my front yard. I live in a hilly neighborhood and began noticing others' walls. And, I thought it would be nice to stop hauling my lawnmower up and down the steep hill in front of my house.

See steep hill:

So, I hired a company to build a "dry stack" wall, which means you can't see any mortar between the stones. They got started, carving away at my hill.

Here is the after picture. What do you think? More curb appeal?

Here's a little closer view of the stone work:

I also had some work done behind my house. I have a garage, but another retaining wall behind my house made it really difficult to get in and out of the garage. After getting locked out of my house and car one morning while scraping the frost off my car (car running, keys in ignition), I decided I needed to address the garage situation.

Here is a before view of the wall in the back. Notice how little you can see of my neighbor's garage - the peak of the roof is peeking out from behind my fence.

Here's an after picture, showing how much of the back yard they removed to create more space.

Finally, my car tucked away in the garage. Exciting!!

The next post will be a little more sexy.

4 comments:

Angie McCullagh said...

Your front wall looks SO good. Nice!

What will be in the next post? Stacy and her newly installed stripper pole?

Stacy in PDX said...

Ha! A stipper pole would be more sexy and very Portland. Apparently, we're very highly ranked in strip clubs per capita.

But, you know, my mother reads this blog, so...

Tina said...

The wall looks fantastic! Apparently you can rest assured that no one peed on it during construction. (See Photo No. 1.)

Tina said...

Make that Photo No. 2.