A few recent pics

   

    

 

    

Beginning of our modern mediterranean hill country garden...

 

Well here it is, finally a post written by Renata! (Those are my lovely chives that are blossoming!)

A lot of my posts will be focusing on the garden for our new modern home. I have spent my life growing up in the garden, in fact my mother used to put me out in my crib in the yard while she worked in the garden. I have a dim memory of looking up at  the leaves shimmering on our old pecan tree in our backyard. So most of my life I have been learning about gardening at the capable side of my mother, who had very particular ideas of how gardening in Texas should be done (ideas she had learned after decades of gardening here and failing many many times). Our harsh climate and never-ending supply of bugs of all kinds makes gardening very challenging here. I planted my first garden as an adult just five years ago. Here is a not so great pic of it:

I started it when I was just a few weeks pregnant with our daughter, and finished it about 6 months later - when I could no longer bend over to plant anything! It's amazing how much work you can get done when you are waiting for the arrival of a new baby! My mother was there the whole time, advising and obsessing with me over each plant and how we were going to make the perfect native plant garden that wouldn't require too much water and would be lush and green and have lots of purple flowers in it! (We both love purple flowers!) The soil we were working with didn't make things easy as it was very much clay and didn't have too much organic material in it. Luckily the native plants we chose don't mind rocky not-so-great soil and the site was on a slope, so things were well drained. Some of the wonderful plants we used were: Rosemary, Blackfoot Daisy, Ghost Plant, Russian Sage, Lavender, Oregano, Salvia Greggii, Mexican Bush Sage, Indigo Spires, Pevonia - I plan on using most of these again as they all seem to like rocky, un-amended soil -- we have lots of that!

At this site I face new challenges - gardening in the hill country with hardly any soil, lots of rocks, prickly native plants with deep roots, cedar trees everywhere!, rabbits who will want to eat everything, snakes!!, and most of all no mom to advise me. Since her death this January I find that I am very anxious about gardening without her. But at the same time I remind myself that she taught me so much and I know a lot more than I give myself credit for. I am sure she will be there watching over me as I try to make my second garden ever succeed!!

Here is what we are working with in the front yard:

And here is the back yard:

Our goal is to have a Mediterranean-ish garden - olive trees, lemon trees, lavender, lots of rosemary and oregano and mint --  and lots of beautiful crushed granite pathways. Our first step is going to be figuring out this hardscaping -- it is the backbone of your garden and is the hardest part to do - especially when you have what seems like endless acres of land to work with! This is the biggest space David and I have had to plan out and our idea is to lay some garden hoses out and play around with how we want to shape things out. (pictures to come)

We also plan on having a decent-sized raised vegetable garden too (right where that big red dumpster sits!) -- want to get that built in time for planting in August -- so this might very well be the first thing we work on once we are in there in June :)

As you can see it is going to take lots of hard work, lots of base and crushed granite, and lots of determination -- but we are so excited to do this and see our ideas come to fruition!

When I have a better idea of what we are going to do on our vast wilderness I will post it - As of now, it is all sketches and ideas in my head and on Pinterest :)

doors, floors, and other jobsite lore

It's been another action packed month of work on the house.  There's been so much going on that I haven't had much time to blog (excuse my 1st world problems).  I'll give you a quick wrap up of all the things that were, well, wrapped up since the last blog post.  We have gotten all of the city inspections completed for the plumbing, electrical, hvac, and framing.  We also needed inspection approval from our structural engineer which did not come quite as easily.  The engineer wanted additional blocking and supports throughout the house.  It ended up being about two days worth of work for the framers.  We actually welcomed the additions since they only served to reinforce what we felt was already a very sturdy and well framed house.  I took a cue from the engineer and started adding additional blocking myself.  Equiped with a hammer, a handsaw, and a box of nails I used some of the leftover lumber to add a bit of a personal touch to the framing.  I mainly concentrated on areas around the doors and places I thought something substantial might be hung.  So anyway, we were very happy to be able to check those boxes for the inspections.

Speaking of very happy, the doors and windows finally came in.  They were just as we had imagined and well worth the money spent on them.  They definitely have that "commercial grade" feel to them and, more importantly, should fulfill their purpose of properly separating inside and outside life unlike the windows from our previous house which often felt like glass screens.  The four panel sliding French doors that look onto the screened porch are very nice and may turn out to be the single most important "on the fly" design change that was made since construction began.  We originally had a French door with a casement window on each side but had a last minute change of heart and wanted something that would let us feel a little more connected with the screened porch and the outside in general.  We were thinking something along the lines of a Nanawall feel but knew we didn't want to spend 20K+ which is what those things cost.  El found us a few different options and we ended up going with the Milgard 4 panel sliding French doors which gave us everything we were looking for at a fraction of the cost.  We love our windows, all 27 of them!  The lock mechanisms on them are great.  We really didn't want some cheap handcrank mechanism that was going get loose and eventually break a few years in.  The only question with these is the screens which don't get put on until the end.  There's some debate as to how exactly they are going to work.  So far we've determined that we will have to open (or possibly remove) the screens to open the windows.  Apparently it's an issue with some casements that some people cannot get past.  Surely there's a casement/people analogy to be made here but I cannot think of a good one at this moment.

Another big step for us was having the floors done, no pun intended.  It seemed like a pretty straight forward process but very labor intensive.  We aren't doing any staining just polishing and sealing.  A lot of work had been done on the floors the last couple months with no protection so we didn't really know for sure that they were going to turn out the way we hoped.  There were scratches, stains, marks, measurements written in several colors, nicks, and a great deal of debris on our soon to be floors that would not have any type of flooring to hide any imperfections.  I suppose most of that was only superficial and in the end we felt like they came out great.  The floors have just the right amount of sheen to them and feel industrial but comfortable at the same time.  They were almost immediately covered so we didn't have a great deal of time to admire them but I suspect we will spend quite a bit of time "getting to know the concrete" as Jay Farrar so well put it in an old Son Volt song.

I also forgot to mention earlier when I was talking about additional work done by yours truly that I ran all of the speaker wire and cat 5 cable.  I did such a great job that I actually ran it twice!  Actually the true story would be that I had to run it a second time to avoid a possible huge mistake.  The first time I ran all of the speaker cables, did I mention there's 11 speakers, I ran them right next to the all of the electric wiring and even through the same holes.  After pondering it for a couple of days and searching quite a few forums on Google I decided that I should exercise a little caution and run everything at a proper distance and with proper separation from all electrical wiring.  You know, the way that just about every guide recommends which I chose to momentarily ignore.  I'm almost certain that there would have been a slight buzz in every speaker to remind of the time I took the easy way out when I had the chance to do things right.  Yet another life lesson just begging to be cleverly tied into a metaphor about walls or general construction.  In fact, I passed on the last one so I'll throw something out this go around.   "In the drywall of life chose your texture wisely."  I can't tell you what it means only that it is profound and far beyond understanding in this dimension we currently occupy...............

So things are good.  I can't tell you when we will be moving in and I honestly don't even want to attempt a real guess (why tempt fate).  But things are moving along very nicely.  In the next couple of days I'll give you an update on the spray foam insulation and exterior stucco which are currently underway.  So on hang tight friends as the modernhomesanantone blog roller coaster navigates the treacherous hairpin turns and g-force inducing drops of home building!  Ok, it's not that dramatic but hey, they're delivering our drywall on Monday.  That has to count for something...............