For some time Tom has complained about a small strip of lawn at the south edge of our back porch. We've always had a bell there on a wooden post and in recent years another post was added with a satellite dish (DirecTV). He said he always had a hard time mowing this area; the posts were in his way.
How about we remove both and turn it into a flower bed? And how about he buy a Victorian cast iron fence section as a backdrop?
I've discouraged doing anything because I'm lazy and I'm almost always satisfied with the status quo. Tom isn't.
So I gave the go ahead. Here's how the work is progressing (I'll add pictures as we complete various steps):
05/07/24
We started by removing the bell. It was at the left edge of this picture. I placed it at the southeast corner of our garden. The satellite dish has been removed, too, but the metal post is still there (just right of center).
05/07/24
And here you can see that the satellite dish post has been removed too. I remember when it was installed. The serviceman dug a hole, pushed the post into the ground and then poured an entire bag of concrete around it. Once dampened it set in place and did a very good job of holding the dish secure and level. Tom and I dug a sizeable hole and began rocking the concrete back and forth. Eventually he was able to lift it from the hole, carry it to the gravel driveway and extricate the post from the concrete with a sledgehammer. I put the dish and post out for the trash.
05/10/24
05/16/24
We drove to Riverside to pick up a section of fence advertised on Facebook Marketplace. The fence was nine feet long. The flower bed is 17 feet long so we centered it with a four foot gap on each end. That's might be where we place bushes. In the winter I like laying a bale of straw against the wall of the house where the bathroom pipes are located. so that gap there was needed.
The fence was standing there just to check the fit and how it would look, I bent some of the vertical pieces back into plumb (by placing a pipe over them) and tapped the finials into place with a hemmer. The fence isn't perfect but it's just what I was looking for ... and it may be a century and a half old already and deserves to show a few bruises.
05/20/24
We moved the fence into the barn and laid it atop two saw horses and placed cardboard beneath it. We used wire brushes to remove any lose paint. Of course we wore masks as the paint on the fence was possibly lead-based.
05/20/24
05/20/24
Once we had the surface of the fence clean, I held it vertical while Tom began spraying on white Rustoleum. I painted other areas. Now the fence is drying. In the days ahead we'll apply more paint as a primer coat and then finish carefully.
The last three pictures are B/W because we're working under a green skylight.
05/21/24
We drove to Menard's and bought three more cans of Rustoleum spray paint. It'll take all four. Tom touched up the side we painted yesterday and now we'll give it a day to dry before turning it over and working on the other side. We also bought two rebars and four clamps as a way of mounting this to the ground when we're reedy.
On May 23 we put the final touches on the flower bed ...
05/23/24 (first)
05/23/24 (last)
As Tom was finishing with the planting a tiny butterfly landed on one of the flowers. "That's my reward," Tom said.
