Garden, Cabinets, and Bees

Friday, Susan and I drove separate cars up so we could bring up the last of the roses. They were all planted in the working garden above the raised beds and brought the rose total to about 60. Earlier this week, 20 fruit trees were planted below the beds. One raised bed has also been planted with 36 asparagus but they won't produce until next year.

One of several rose beds.

Asparagus bed

The landscape plan for the garden around the house (what we are calling the courtyard garden) has been finalized and our landscape contractor is finishing up the implementation plan. The area close in is more formal while the area above the retaining wall has mostly native plants and a more natural setting. When I saw the plant list, it's length reminded me of a Dicken's novel. Fortunately, we can keep the costs down by using smaller specimens of the fast growing plants.

The paper had an article about backyard beekeeping the other day and it sounded relatively easy and fascinating. It turns out there is a store on the way up to the house that sells beekeeping supplies and offers free classes. I'm taking their "Introduction to Beekeeping" class on Saturday. After that, I'll decide if I want to give it a try. With all our fruit trees and flowers, our yard should be bee heaven.

All the horizontal concrete surfaces are being sandblasted to clean them up and make them more uniform. I was amazed at the difference sandblasting makes but it is noisy and messy. The standard comment from the crew was "it looks great but I can't wait for it to be done".

Shop door, barn style.

All the floors in the main part of the house now have 2 coats of finish; the final coat will go on at the very end. The concrete around the fireplace has been installed and the finish trim has been started.

Fireplace

Western deck

The tile work in all the bathrooms except the master is almost complete. The pool shower is really nice because it has a large skylight which brings in a lot of natural light.

Guest bath

Pool bath with natural light

The cabinets are being installed and work is progressing rapidly. The bedroom, office, pool deck, and laundry/project cabinets are almost complete. The ones in the common areas should go in next week.

Kitchen cabinet wood (eucalyptus)

Pool cabinets (richlite)

The furniture we have on order is beginning to trickle in. So far, we have been able to hold off on delivery but I suspect the suppliers aren't going to want to provide free storage for much longer. (We are still about 6 weeks away from being able to bring in furniture.) In several cases, we got outrageous quotes for shipping to the new house so we will have these items delivered to Oakland then we'll hire a moving company to move everything up at once. Since we've decided to keep the Oakland house for the foreseeable future, we actually won't be moving much existing furniture up to the new house.