side yard pathway
WestCoast Hopeful
4 years ago
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Missi (4b IA)
4 years agoWestCoast Hopeful
4 years agoRelated Discussions
Suggestions for this side yard walkway - photos included
Comments (1)try posting on the cottage forum! they always have great ideas!...See MoreSide yard slopes towards house
Comments (16)The plan and sketchup perspective are helpful. It was the deck along the side that I wanted to know about. If you limit the width of the swale to only about 4', you may not be able to achieve enough capacity to hold all the water during a torrential storm. I'd widen the swale to about half the distance between house and fence. Making it wider is fine, but the wider it is, the larger the retaining wall must be. Though I said I'd avoid creating the swale below the deck, I will now eat my words. Often, in a remodel situation--especially with limited space and where everything around is already built up--one cannot do everything in the perfectly ideal manner. But in creating it under the deck, I'd make sure it's wide enough to have sufficient capacity. In the sketch, I'm showing the deck using the wall as a support, but whether you could do that, or not, depends on how things shake out in the relationship of finish floor elevation (ffe) to existing grade. You seem like the kind of guy who would have a nice laser level, or need an excuse to buy one. You might some evening use one to mark the ffe directly on the grade (with paint) so you can get a nice visual of what you're dealing with. Depending, you may be able to create a secondary swale at the top of the wall and disperse the water before it goes into the primary swale. But because of grade and roots, that might not work out. You also might build the wall higher than I show and connect the deck to its side. Or, the deck may be independent of the the wall. Hopefully, you can understand the sketch of the drainage scheme. The arrows indicate that you must drain water away from your house at ALL sides. Near the back, it collects in the swale and is moved around the house to lower elevations on its way toward the front. I would not be much concerned about the tree roots. The prior disturbances are long ago and trees have nothing better to do than grow replacement roots, so they've long ago been re-established. The rear-most tree will maintain more than 3/4 of it's roots in spite of your building a wall in its vicinity. Near the front-most tree, if you end the wall aiming directly at the trunk, as I've shown, you will have little need to remove many large roots. It can recover from other excavation you do in the vicinity. (See the part of the sketch, in red and black, floating above the deck.)...See MoreToad lily
Comments (9)Plant Delights Nursery has a long list of toad lilies. I attached the web site. I searched the site under the latin name, trycirtis, took 3 tries since I always mispell it. LOL I assume that this is what you meant by toad lily, if not, please ignore the rest of this post. I don't have much expertise growing toad lilies, but can tell you my experience. Last year I bought 3 different toad lilies from my local garden center, Empress, Amethystina, & Tojen. I planted 2 of them in a very heavily shaded spot under a low growing crab apple tree and one along my side yard pathway (east side of house) with light until about 1 p.m in summer and somewhat wetter & more open conditions. All of them grew nicely and 2 of them bloomed that year in the fall. Empress (on the east side) bloomed the best and Tojen in the heavy shade bloomed a few blooms. Amethystina, which was also in heavy shade, did not bloom. However, only 2 of them wintered over, the two in heavy dry shade. This year the two that wintered over put out quite a few flowering stems and bloomed all along each stem in very nice sprays. Both of them, however, turned out to be Tojen, a T. hirta variety, which I have read is somewhat hardier. Caveat: Even the "dry shade" under my crab apple tree is heavy clay, which retains water, softened with heavy leaf litter each year. Here is a link that might be useful: Plant Delights...See MoreCen Cali Pool Build
Comments (44)Polishing starts the following day! The pebble surface is pretty hard after just a day. These wet polishers required noisy high pressure generators to work. Five Mario brothers and four generators, a pump to get the water out of the deep end, and you can't hear a single thing other than the din of motors and water. When they were done polishing (took the whole day), they started the water to fill the pool! There's little water pressure in the house when both hoses are running into the pool. We had to shut off a hose whenever we needed to take a shower or cook in the kitchen. All kinds of leaves were already blown into the half-filled pool from the wind and rain storm. We used our new pool toy to skim the leaves off the surface. Unfortunately, we filled the pool knowing we had to drain it again. The polishing scratched up all the glass step diamonds as well as the medallion. The pool finishing company agreed to replace all of the Lightstream glass tiles and some of the really badly scratched pieces on the medallion at no cost to me (well, except for the electricity to pump the water out, and also the cost of the water itself). But the custom pieces would take a week or more to make and Thanksgiving holidays was smack-dab in the middle of it. :(...See MoreYardvaark
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