Project done

Finished the patio cover this weekend.  Just in time for a round of unseasonably cool weather.  Still, it was nice to finish my birthday by completing a project and having a glass of wine on our patio.

If you look closely you can see the actual wine on the table!

We put the shade fabric up on top. This intrigued Cailan who had wondered how a few sticks were going to make shade. He and Grandma had been walking around saying "there will be good shade as long as you stay under those little sticks." They thought that was pretty funny.

We planted a couple of new things to help the space out a bit. We put a honeysuckle by the post, which will hopefully grow up the structure and attract lots of humming birds. Since it was one of our projects, we had to ad a touch of unusual to it. We took an idea we used on our fence in Tacoma and elaborated on it to make two privacy panels with a flowering vine cutout.

We're very happy with the way they turned out. Heather and Cailan made the design and I got to do the jigsaw work.

Here's Cailan already at play in the new area! He has evidently decided that with the privacy screens in place, the patio is an acceptable "no pants" zone.

Shade seekers

Overall we love our house on the park, but there have always been a couple places that we've found a little lacking: there is no basement, which means there's minimal storage space, and there is no good spot for outdoor dining or even just hanging out in the back yard.  We have a sun porch off the dinding room, but the floor of it slopes badly, so putting our picnic table there didn't work.  Also, it gets pretty darn hot there in the middle of summer.  The sun porch opens onto a concrete patio but that too is blazing hot on a summer afternoon.  We've talked about demolishing the slanty sun porch and replacing it with a deck, but we actually get some use out of it as a play room. We've talked about replacing the flower bed on the west side of the sun porch with a patio, where we could take advantage of the shade from the big honey locust tree. And we've talked about building a cover over the existing patio.  The last option makes the best use of the existing structures and the yard, so that's what we decided to do.

During the early spring, we drew up plans and made lists of materials, but as soon as the weather got nice we were too eager to hit the trails to spend time on building projects.  The last weekend in April, however, is the Fruita Fat Tire Festival, an annual event that draws thousands of mountain bikers to the local trails.  The thought of fighting those crowds gave us an incentive to take a biking break and work on our patio instead.  This is how we spent the weekend: