Painting Weather

The weather has finally cooled off and we have several days of weather with low risk of rain in the forecast so today—finally—we got to work on priming the garden shed. Once Aaron arrived to help Jeff, I wandered off to my own painting project.

I think unless we get rain, we'll be able to finish painting this by the end of the weekend.

I nearly finished up painting the galvanized iron patio furniture. Jeff wanted more copper on it, so I painted all the cornucopias in the copper paint. I need to do a bit of touch up with green paint, but I'm quite happy with how it looks.

Planting Table Set Up

I've finished sealing the planting table and I'm quite happy how it turned out.

In June, Jeff bought me some Daly's Seafin' Ship'N Shore, a fairly expensive sealer, for the picnic table. But then we bought the can of Olympic Rescue It!  Since we had not returned the can of sealer, I decided to try it on the planting table.
I only sealed the horizontal surfaces.

I sprayed a bit of water on the table yesterday and it beaded on the surface.

While it was so hot in Portland yesterday we worked on clearing out the spot for it in the basement. Aaron and Jeff moved it into the basement this morning. I spent the morning moving in. I'm excited to start using it for seed starting.

Bareroot Hostas

I've never had hostas before, but I constantly see them in photos of shade gardens and when I learned they survive fine under black walnuts I decided I should probably add them to our plant shopping list.

A couple of weeks ago when I was working on my plant layout for the hidden garden I ran across this deal: Hosta Bumper Crop Mix (10) for $10 plus shipping. Having learned from my past experience with fraudulent online sellers, before I considered ordering I looked them up on Dave's Garden and they had acceptable reviews. I don't expect every company to be perfect, but I do expect them to fix their mistakes.

Anyway, I ended up spending $28 on 20 bareroot hostas. Since most of the hostas I see at nurseries are at least $6, I figured if at least 5 of them lived I'd be ahead. LOL  They arrived a couple of days after I ordered them.

They were packed in bags with moist sawdust which still had some moisture when they arrived.

They looked healthy enough. At least they looked alive.

One thing I did badly when I ordered is I forgot to consider my pot situation. I was almost out of gallon pots. So, when these came, I had to cram most of them into deep 4" pots, which some of them clearly didn't like.

Over the past week it was obvious which weren't going to make it in the little pots and we've put those in the ground and they're doing well now. (I'm not including photos of all of the hosta in the ground.)

And the rest in the pots, only about 10 days after I planted them.

I don't know my hosta varieties, but it does look like I only got two different kinds. It would have been nice to have more variety, but if you don't care what kind you get, this particular deal was a great bargain.

Update later: Got them all in gallon pots and it looks like there might be 3 varieties. I hope to get all these in the ground in September, once we have the black walnut tree pruned.

Firewood Rack

And we finished another salvage wood project! A firewood rack for the side of the house.

This project used up the last of the weathered 2x4s and fence slats. Some of the boards were pretty skanky but they worked fine for this purpose.

The rack is designed to sit on top of cinder blocks. Here is the original inspiration photo and the website: Firewood Rack Plan for Half Rick of Wood Built on Cinder Blocks

We'll put it in the queue and Jeff and Aaron will put it up on cinder blocks and level it in a few weeks. This should encourage us to hang on to some of the firewood kicking around the yard. It will also help us limit how much we keep because with how rarely we have fires, this amount of firewood should be plenty.

This is probably the last salvage project for a while since we are almost out of wood. We still have quite a few 2x6s left, but I'm not really finding projects that use them. I'm open to suggestions. LOL

Update later:

Operation Organize Garage

Building all of these salvage projects has given us the confidence to take on a bigger project: Garage De-Disastering. There is so much stuff in there right now it is impossible to work inside. This is what it looks like today (and shockingly this is actually better than it was a few weeks ago before Aaron and Jeff put a bunch of shingles up in the rafters.)

I'd really like to take everything out and organize all the smaller stuff into tubs. And we'll also finally get rid of the remaining SCA gear we no longer use. Some of it is crammed into the back corner so we haven't been able to get to it to rehome it all.

I looked around for some easy-to-build tub storage shelves and I decided to go with the garage storage wall design from the Family Handyman website. As usual, though, I'm not going to use their exact design; I needed to change some of the dimensions to better fit the 56- and 28-quart Sterilite tubs.

This is two racks, side-by-side. The white boxes
represent the dimensions of the tubs we're going to use.

This design requires almost no cutting; we only have to cut 5 sheets of plywood in half the long way. All the rest of the pieces are 8'. This is a 16' run of shelves and we should be able to fit it along the left-side wall.

This is not our next project. First, we have to finish painting the shed. And then we have to finish prepping the soil and planting all the plants in the Hidden Garden behind the garage. After those tasks are finished, we can hopefully turn our attention to this project.

Garden Bench

We finished another project! I've been having a lot of fun building stuff with our giant pile of salvaged lumber. This time a small bench for our hidden garden.

I can't really say that we made it for free like many blogs do because ultimately we did buy the wood and the expensive white stain, just not for this project. But we spent no additional money to finish this project.

I decided to spend a bit more care with this wood because it is going to continue to live in the weather. First I sanded it, then I stained all of the edges with at least two coats of the opaque outdoor stain we used on the fence and pergola.

This bench was actually made from a mix of cedar and fir scraps. I think the cedar was leftover from our fence project and most of the fir was leftover from building the shed. But I'm pretty sure some of the sketchy boards we took 9-inch pieces from were still kicking around from when we demolished the old garage in 2012. There were some boards that were mostly rotted but if they had a good 9-inches, we cut it off and used it. The parts that were too far gone to use are now loaded in the back of the truck, bound for the Metro recycling center.

This will be its spot in the hidden garden. The guys have dug a trench to make a pad for it.

Good Progress Today

The guys had a good day today working on backyard projects. Jeff did a quick pressure wash of my planting table. Once it dries out, I'm going to use a sealer on the tabletop and shelf before it moves into the basement.

Then he pressure-washed the wall along the property line. We didn't realize quite how dirty it was until he started cleaning it.