Bouncing Marty

When we moved into our house the back yard didn’t have a whole lot going on besides an impressive crop of crabgrass, a whole lot of sunshine, and a ceramic chicken.  We have a fairly large area out back (by Vegas standards) and wanted to create some more livable and usable space.  We spent most of the Fall planting greenery and working on the crabgrass, and as Spring rolled around and things started growing, we realized we would never be able to enjoy our hard work without some shade from the desert heat.  We needed a patio cover.  We considered getting one of the pre-made aluminum covers, but I realized that if I built it from wood I’d have an excuse to buy all kinds of cool tools, so the decision was made.  Initial sketches look like this:

Attached to the house at the roof rafters, with two posts out front.  I had initially planned on using redwood for the entire project, but realized fairly quickly that my budget was not nearly large enough to cover that kind of cost.  Redwood is about four times the cost of fir around here so the main structural pieces ended up redwood, and the crossing rafters and lattice as fir.

First step was laying out everything on our slab, then the footings.  I dug holes about 24″ square, made some forms, and dumped in almost 20 sacks of concrete.  I used the biggest post holders I could find, and set them in the concrete.

I used 4×4 posts, and capped them with 2×6’s to conceal the metal post holders.  The hardware for the project is all 5/8″ zinc, and I used some regular steel load bearing plates painted black to dress it up a little.

Its so dry and hot here that wood tends to self destruct in record time.  Because of this, I wanted to build the patio cover with very little dependence on fasteners.  I didn’t want to be able to see any screws or clips from below, and I didn’t want any weight hanging off of flimsy screw threads.  (More like I didn’t want to have sleepless nights a few years down the road every time the wind blows, thinking my patio cover’s going to tear the house apart.)   I figured a way to notch out the 2×6’s on the posts so they would bear the weight of the main cross beams, then carved and notched the beams themselves to hold all of the rafters.  I used a template and my handy new router to make some foo-foo ends as well.

The main cross beams are 14′ long 2×10’s.  Each one weighed a bit more than 100lbs.  You can imagine that it was an adventure to get them up 10′ onto the posts….

Next up I made a matching ledger board for the house side, and reinforced the house with hurricane ties off the roof rafters on to the 2×8 fascia board.  Then I ran the main 2×8 rafters out to sandwich the posts in place.

Up next came the most time consuming part.  Cutting all of the decorative ends on the 2×6 rafters.  Took forever.  I think it was worth it though, the swoopy ends make it look nice and finished.

The final step was to create the shade layer on top.  I did this by ripping 2×4’s down the middle, basically making my own 2×2’s to put on top.  I cut all of them, then put them all up on top of the rafters.  Sandwiched them all together, and screwed down every other 2×2.  The you pick out the ones you didn’t screw down and re-stack them.  Repeat again and again, and it evenly spaces them across the cover.

I put in two more posts near the house to help bear some of the weight of the cover, and some 45 degree braces at the big posts to stiffen it up a bit.  I don’t have a final picture of how it looks nowadays but the one below is pretty close.  I’ve cut off the post ends, and put the first of many coats of a waterproofing wood stain on it.  The closely spaced 2×2’s block the sun for the majority of the day, and the cover has really opened up the backyard for us.  Unfortunately the neighbors are still RIGHT next-door, so next up is to get some outdoor curtains to enclose it a little bit.  Then some patio furniture and lighting and we’ll have a quiet place to eat some meals outside in privacy.

Well…its been a while. I don’t even know where to start. We had a great and low key holiday season at home, and it has rolled right into a nice Vegas spring. Adventures have been fairly limited and photo taking even more so. Combine that with fun and busy days and nights, and reporting gets pushed to the wayside.

We managed to spend the majority of our winter and spring weekends puttering around the house. The domestication levels have reached a new high at the Hindley Household. I’ll try to detail a couple projects that have been demanding attention as of late.

Last fall we tackled putting in some laminate flooring, which dramatically changed a lot of things about the house. Like a lot of projects we seem to get into, the majority of the work goes very quickly, but tying up the last loose ends takes an incredible amount of time and energy. To put the flooring in, we had to remove all the baseboards from the surrounding walls. They were typical track home style, very cheap painted fake-wood-stuff about 2″ tall. We replaced it with some fancy-shmancy 6″ boards that look a lot better. Below is a before/after in the kitchen. (Just after the boards were nailed up, not finished/painted yet.)

I was lucky enough to have a good friend who found a used compressor for me to have (Thanks Willie!!), and picked up a cheap finish nail gun to attach the boards with. Getting the baseboards up was fun and went fairly fast. I’m by no means a finish carpenter. I’m much more of a hack rip and tear kind of carpenter. Thank goodness for caulking and paint. I did a lot of fighting with our poor concrete, and wavy walls trying to keep the boards square and looking decent. It took two lazy Saturdays to get them up through the house, and we’re slowly working on finishing them. We pre-painted them in the garage with a sprayer (see below), and have been trying different various methods of finishing to see what works best. Its slow work…but we’ll get it done someday. Eventually we’ll repaint the caulking at the joints and nail holes, and do some touchup on the walls surrounding to finish up.

If you asked me what I thought of gardening two years ago, you would have gotten a response something like…”Gardening is for people who have nothing else to do.” Funny how things change. I spent a lot of time last winter doing this:

Just looking at that photo makes my back ache. When we bought our house, the backyard was basically a little patch of mostly dead grass surrounded by a concrete curb, with some dirt surrounding it covered in 3″ of pea gravel, and a plaster chicken in a birdbath.

And NOW…we have a kind of growing patch of grass surrounded by a bunch of bushes and trees and sprinklers and stuff and a plaster chicken in a birdbath.

Mollie has taken it upon herself to rid our backyard of all crabgrass, which is an incredible task. She’s weeded and feeded, she’s seeded, she’s ripped and pulled and watered. She’s removed large patches and replaced with sod. Quite the project. I think its going to pay off bigtime, our grass is starting to come in this spring nice and green.

Don’t let anyone fool you. Digging in the desert is awful. I can not believe the size and consistency of rocks in the soil here. We literally had to remove a truckload of white desert sandstone from our backyard that I pulled up to plant our trees and bushes.

We dug in a Modesto Ash, a Raywood Ash, and a Pink Dawn Chitalpa Multi-trunk in the backyard. We had to wait a good three months to see if our trees and plants were going to grow, and it looks like things are going to take. The above shot is the Modesto, and is turning more and more green each day. The other trees are not far behind, and its been surprisingly satisfying watching plants grow in our soil. Hard work paying off. Pretty fun.

We even have some flowers! We put in two large Chaste bushes, and Mollie put in a nice little Butterfly bush which is flowering nicely. Above is a Pineapple Guava. These hearty little guys grow well in the desert, and we planted ten of them around the yard to add some greenery to the block walls. Even they are growing in our spring sunshine. The red arrow above is pointing to a drip sprinkler head, which brings us to the final project we’ve been working on.

I hate our previous home owners. We keep discovering more and more poor workmanship in their home ‘projects’. Irritating. Above is the utility box for our backyard sprinklers. What a mess. I don’t want to get into much detail, but they did a lot of bad wiring and poor waterproofing, making working with our existing sprinklers a total pain. Well, after some frustration, I learned the ins and outs of sprinkler valves, PVC plumbing, digging trenches, and running drip lines. Now most all of our plants and trees have their own drippers to keep them alive when the heat comes on.

Its been a productive spring, and I think its going to pay off with a fun and relaxed summertime. Hopefully soon we’ll have some of our projects completed, and move onto bigger an better things.

Times are changing. As much as I love my Land Cruiser, its going to have to go. Its just too much truck to be driving my commute every day, and the utility of the big 4×4 isn’t getting used as much as it should. So, we’ve been shopping for something different.

To complete the whole domestication process, I need to have a pickup to haul general house-stuffs around. I have always been a Toyota fan, and wanted something smaller with decent gas mileage, so the Tacoma was the obvious choice. The flavor of mine is a 1999 4×4 with the V6, and the TRD Offroad package. Fun stuff. Shouldn’t be getting stuck anytime soon.

And of course, its already come in handy. Hauling lumber, and an impromptu work-bench. And of course, gotta haul something ridiculously large with it, so we piled some of our new trees into it instead of opting for a delivery. Is hanging 15′ of tree out the back of the bed legal?

We didn’t get busted…so it must be. Now to plant those trees. Anyone want to come over for a potluck/hole digging party?

And this one’s for the Swenson’s. Nice personalized license plate, seen on the commute.

We live in a track home. Hard to believe I know, but Las Vegas is packed full of them. One thing we’ve discovered about living in such a cookie cutter house is that the builders don’t often spend the money on quality materials, in order to save a few pennies here and there.

Prime example, side house gate. Rusted. Paint didn’t last for 5 years, and the masonry bolts holding it all together were loose and painfully ugly. Typical in the neighborhood.

So last Saturday I was digging holes in the backyard in some attempt at landscaping (I use the word ‘digging’ loosely here. Maybe picking rocks and chipping desert concrete is a more appropriate description.) After swinging the pick one too many times, I stood up in my frustration and the gate caught my eye. It was GO TIME.

See the gate doesn’t open either. The previous owners left a padlock on it. Yes, also rusted. Convenient. I grapped pliers, snips, cutters and other tools of destruction and managed to destroy the gate. I felt wonderful. That is until I realized that now I had to explain to my wife why I destroyed our perfectly functional side gate. Oh yeah! Its because I want to build a NEW EVEN BETTER ONE YEAH! Heh…of course that was the plan all along.

I don’t have too many photos of the process. Keithers previously mentioned that I should post more details on the stuff I do, to make it more informative and useful. So, I’ll give the basics of gate building. Or at least of how I tried to work it.

Trip to the Depot. Three 8′ 2×4’s, and seven 8′ 1×6’s are all the lumber that I required. More might be necessary if your gate is wider…mine was right at 40″. The Depot has all kinds of hinge setups available, and I found some black painted weather resistant ones, that came with burly wood screws. Three hinges seemed appropriate. Grab a matching clasp and you are good to go.

My situation was kind of different because I had to attach the thing to concrete block. This required another trip to the Depot to grab a 1/4″ masonry bit to drive holes for some wedge anchors. I used Redhead wedge anchors when I used to metal frame and knew they worked well, so that’s what I went with. I have a hard time trusting masonry screws.

I built the gate with a center spreader, and three cross braces. The planks are screwed down to the frame using 2″ coated screws to prevent them from rusting and turning the purdy wood colors. I pre-drilled my holes, and countersunk them by drilling with a larger drill bit 1/2″ into the wood or so to make a slot for them to sit in. I opted to make the arch on top to spice it up a bit (man that sounded lame). I did this by getting Mollie to hold a line at the base of the gate for me, then I scribed a circle across the top. Little work with the handsaw and some sanding and I was good to go.

I shimmed the gate into place with some wood scraps, marked my holes and drilled away into the masonry. It really went fairly smoothly and all the wedge anchors held well. I hung the gate one hinge at a time, fixed the clasp, and it was basically done. Now we just need to stain it with some kind of sealer to keep the weather from destroying it. All in all it took me about five hours to build and hang it. Time well spent to not have to look at the rusted junker gate anymore.

In addition to the flooring install, we’re tackling the hall bathroom. Well not really tackling. Porcelain isn’t very forgiving.

Here’s a cheesy panorama of how bath looks. This shot was taken with the new toilet and tile installed. A great improvement over the peeling yellow lenolium and leaky small toilet that came with the house. At this point, I still needed to install the new pedestal sink, plumb in the faucet, patch my drywall destruction, re-texture the wall, and repaint. Then replace the light fixture, new towel bar, and install an new mirror.

The sink went in fairly easy. I had some sequencing issues. I took out the light fixture prior to installing the sink, and didn’t replace until after the sink was done. I like to think I did it just to increase the challenge. Plumbing by headlamp is romantic afterall.

At this point we have a new light fixture installed (after another set of fixtures was installed and deemed not worthy…back to Home Depot). Holes patched and painted, good as new. We are still on the search for the ‘perfect’ mirror and towel bar…and we are also planning on removing the mirrored medicine cabinet to replace it with something matching. Fun stuff.

The shirt says it all.

Things are progressing nicely with the house. It seems like when I’m ready to report on what we’ve just recently done, I realize that I haven’t said anything about the last bit of work we completed…so here’s some photos of some of our laminate flooring install.

We tore all the carpet up, and spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the best way to install the flooring. Overall its really an easy process. However, I was bound and determined to make things as difficult as possible. We are installing the flooring in the front room, down the hall, and through the master bedroom. After a lot of planning, I put together these fancy corners. Here’s how it was looking.

See how the diagonal joint comes out, instead of the boards just laying straight? Looked pretty cool. Unfortunately, doing this had some poor consequences. There is one location about 7″ long at each joint that doesn’t interlock, and when we put weight on these locations, the flooring warps and gaps emerged. Not good…would lead to a lot of wear, and just look bad in a few years I’m sure.

So, the boards went straight. Ended up tearing out a lot of flooring and doing things several times to get it back to the way I should have done it in the first place. So the corner went straight, and cleaned up really nice. Not as ornate, but sure looks good. The hall went quickly after I made the corners and cut in the doors/closets.

This last weekend we finished up the hall bathroom, and completed the flooring in the master bedroom. Minus about 6 boards, which I came up short of course. I’ll order them and slap them in sometime next week. I can’t believe the difference between the crappy carpet and the laminate wood. Looks a ton better. Here’s the hall, before and after.

Fun stuff. Next up is baseboards…then we’ll move on to getting the backyard landscaped. Never ending….

Something is happening at the Hindley Household. A lot of things actually. We’ve decided to tackle some home improvement. Things on the hit list include the hall bathroom, and most of the flooring throughout the house.

Over the last month or so we’ve been slowing demolishing and removing the stuff we can’t stand to look at any more. The hall bathroom lost a sink, cabinet, toilet, mirror, and some gross peeling yellow lenolium. I handily used the sawz-all to coerce the cabinet to get out of the house. Mollie donned the safety glasses to do the same with the bathroom mirror (safety first right?)

The biggest change that we’re attempting with the house is a removal of the carpet and lenolium, and replacement with some laminate wood flooring. I hadn’t heard much of the laminate before, and was very skeptical of this ‘fake wood’ stuff. We did some research and after learning a lot about flooring, we decided that it was the way to go. I like the idea of having real hardwood floors, but they take a lot of maintenance, and are not nearly as durable as laminate. Two weekends ago the real business began. (This photo’s for Keith.)

Mollie and I spent the greater part of a Saturday ripping out carpet and banging out the carpet strips. Scraping the floor and removing the carpet adhesive and generally getting things ready was fun and tough work.

I’ve got lots more pics of the process on Flickr if you’alls are interested. This last weekend we got most of the flooring complete in the main room, and the corner down the hall is laid out and ready. The flooring took a good part of the weekend, but I’ll have to post about that later when I get some more pictures loaded.

I’ve kept it fairly under wraps, but Mollie and I have been house shopping for a while now. Paying for two rents has been very taxing, and frustrating to see that much money going down the tubes every month. And, if we are going to combine all of our precious belongings (aka…junk) together into one place, we’re going to have to have some more room.

Vegas housing is complicated, to say the least. Mollie and I both grew up in cities where your usual home has a real yard, grass, trees, and maybe even room to pay a game of football out back. You had neighbors, but they were down the road a ways, and privacy was something that was taken for granted. Homes were unique, built one at a time, and each had character, flaws, and benefits unlike any other home around town.

Welcome to the Vegas Housing Tracks. There are homes in Vegas that met our mental image of what a house should be, but they all either cost over a million dollars, or are in neighborhoods that I wouldn’t walk through without a trained German attack dog. So, we narrowed our sites a little, and found a house that is a perfect compromise of price, size, location, neighborhood, and privacy. Its 1425sq/ft, with a 5,200sq/ft lot. Three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a very open floor plan. The focus of the house is on the main room, kitchen, and dining room that you can see above. Vaulted ceilings and new tile and carpet make it feel quite ‘new’.

It was built in 2002, and is located in the Northern part of Las Vegas. The neighborhood is nice, and literally everything within 20 miles of it has been built within the last 7 years. It’s in a neighborhood full of larger two story homes, but we were fortunate to find one that isn’t surrounded by bigger looming houses, so the back yard is more private than the usual Vegas track home. The backyard could use some work, which I’m kind of excited about actually. Reminds me of my yard work days as a kid!

We closed our offer and the house is in escrow as we speak. There is still a LOT to be done, but we are scheduled to close escrow by February 28th. I can’t wait to have some more space! And a mortgage! (Well, not so much on the mortgage).

There’s lots more pictures in my gallery, or click on one to be pulled into my Flickr album. I can’t believe we are going to be homeowners!