https://giphy.com/gifs/britney-spears-oops-i-did-it-again-FjWEXNradAzYY Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/britney-spears-oops-i-did-it-again-FjWEXNradAzYY I missed another blog post again last week. I’m not proud of it and there’s no real excuses this time. Back on track this week with the final part of the retaining wall installation.  After removing the old chain link fence and digging the trench for the new retaining wall, I could get down to the actual wall install. I made sure to dig the trench to about 8” below grade prior to installing the first row of 6” x 6” x 8’ timbers. With ~2” of gravel as a base for leveling and stability, that meant that the first row of timbers would be completely buried in the end. This helps make the base of the wall secure for the long run. Another key piece of installing the first row of timbers was to make sure that they were level. Behind the wall a perforated tube…

Those of you reading out there may have noticed that I took last week off from the blog. I try to stay consistent with my posts, but with the storm two weekends ago and the power outage, I didn’t post until the middle of that week. On top of that, I began a project that has been taking up a lot of my time and making me pretty exhausted: building a new retaining wall. Our property, amongst other issues, is significantly higher than our rear neighbors. On the east side of the workshop, there is was a chain link fence that held up our entire yard (not ideal). It's kind of hard to tell here, but that chain link fence on the left is holding up about 2' of our yard. The storm which took out our tree a couple of weekends ago also took down the fence between us…

Today’s post is being written on a Tuesday, instead of the typical Sunday routine. That is because Denver, and a large portion of the front range of Colorado, experienced extremely high winds over the weekend. Our house lost power from Saturday evening until Monday morning and unfortunately, that is not all we lost. Let’s take a collective break from the dining table build this week to say a proper goodbye to a ~70 year old tree. Note the wonderful shade that the tree provided in the afternoon (and the old, terrible hoophouse). Our shade tree, while not beautiful, was an impressive elm that dominated the front landscape of our yard. On Saturday, Allyson and I had started working inside, knowing that a big storm was coming our way. We felt the wind calm and then the house was hit by winds so strong it felt like the pressure wave from…

Compost is considered black gold for gardners. We buy large quantities every year to try and amend our soil and make it more suitable for growing food. Compost is also a great way to get rid of food and yard scraps and “recycle” them back into good nutrients for the soil. Back in 2017, Allyson and I started our composting journey, mostly as a way to reduce our food waste. We bought a vermicompost box at that time. Vermicompost is made by putting food scraps into a bin with worms, typically red wigglers. Unfortunately, our first foray into vermicomposting resulted in a large number of fruit flies in the small apartment we were renting at the time. Luckily, we bought a home shortly after and had space to make a large compost pile outside. The vermicompost still lives on, but we put way less food in it now. This helps…

Last week I wrote about installing a vent fan in our bathroom to help with the humidity (and smells). This week is about the chandelier that we installed. All of the wiring in our house when we moved in was ungrounded, including the lighting. I spent a couple weeks after we bought the house, but before we moved in, to run new wiring to all of the outlets with grounding. At that time I got an electrician to put in a new 200 amp service to our house and add the grounding rods. What I did not do, however, was upgrade any of the lighting. At the time I didn’t want to open up any walls or ceilings to access the wires. Honestly, the lighting circuits worked fine and there wasn’t a big rush to upgrade them.  That all changed when Allyson asked me to install a new chandelier in…