Purple raised beds and garden bench

This is a little landscape job we just recently did in Chapel Hill, NC. Lots of purple, makes a great accent and warms up the front yard.

These raised garden beds were constructed with Cox re dried pressure treated lumber which comes ready to paint. Normal treated lumber you get at the big box store you need to let it dry 4-6 months before painting it. Because of the high moisture content in normal treated lumber painting it would lock in the moisture and cause it to rot from the inside out.

The 12 foot long purple bench with an Italian accent tile routed into it.

This shows the details of how the back of the bench was made, used 1/2 inch galvanized carriage bolts and leaned the back rest at 15 degrees. The 4 posts are 4 x 6s planted in the ground 2 foot with concrete, this bench is very solid.

Ironwoods Deck & Porch Project

This job took Bonifacio and I about two months to complete. The job was at the bottom of a steep hill making it a real chore to get materials and tools down there. The owners are very pleased and this is why I take on such projects to make my customers happy.  Thinking back I never thought this project would look so big, it was a lot of work. Thanks to James for designing it and recommending  us to do the project!

Two deck levels, the upper has removal-able decking with an hidden roof under it.

The lower stairs to the back yard. The landscaper will fill in at the bottom of the steps.

The back end of the deck and porch, showing the custom lattice work in one 12 foot panel.

Lower porch showing ceiling with ceiling fans.

Upper level deck showing removable decking panels and Ipe top railings.

stairs with custom made lattice

Southern Village Screened Porch

Just finished a screened porch in Southern Village (Chapel Hill, NC) my customer was very pleased with the results. It was a lot of work being on a hillside with NO level ground.

Before photo!

Here is the house before I started, this deck was built about 10 years ago. The lower deck was built for small children, it was not tall enough for adults to use without bending over.

After

Now the deck is complete. I still have to paint the band boards, posts, stair stringers and hand railing. The painted hand railing I re used the old pickets and re painted them, The best ones from the old deck that is. The reason I’m not painting the rest right away is wet treated lumber painted too soon can rot the wood as the paint holds in the moisture.

Here is the kitty door so the inside cats can come out onto the porch and enjoy the outside air by themselves or with the family.
I install beaded board ceiling in most of the porches I build. The beaded board has knots and I use an oil based primer to block out the knots. We also pre-paint the ceiling boards before installing as the ceiling boards will shrink and unpainted wood will show after shrinkage.
This photo shows the steps. I made the steps easy to climb with a 7 inch rise and 13 inch tread, the old steps were kind of scary with an 8 1/2 inch rise and 9 inch tread. To the right of the steps is where some potted plants will go.

Cedar porch with hot tub and sundeck

I spent 10 weeks building this deck with hot tub and screened in porch.  Not the entire 10 weeks I did several small projects for other customers while building this.

Below is the house before we started on it. The small stoop and overhang proved to be very well built as it did not come down as easy as we thought it would.

Notice the concrete retaining wall? On the other side of it was an old underground oil tank. We checked out getting the tankpulled out and cleaned up and it would have cost more than $3000. Instead we had an engineer redesign the structure under the hot tub and move the footers. The oil tank had the proper papers proving it was purged and taken care of properly.

Here is the finished porch! It has a flat 10 foot high cedar T&G cedar ceiling and the finished size is 14 ft x 14 ft. The roof only has a 1/4 inch per foot slope so it fit well onto the side of the house.

Notice the jeep under the deck, we installed a product called Rain Escape with a special plastic sheets  installed over the floor joists that bring the water to  the under the deck downspouts under each row of floor joists and the downspouts drop the water into a gutter to keep the jeep dry under the deck. This Rain Escape system is not cheap but it works well.


Note the stair lighting to be installed by the home owner, this will create soft lighting when they are enjoying the hot tub!

Here you can see the stoop ceiling, the light is still on order.
This photo shows the cedar ceiling with the drop down portion that connects the lower attached stoop roof. All during the job I wondered how we would made this area look good. You can also see the brown venting we installed in the ceiling as the ceiling is not open to the eaves and here in our area venting the ceiling is a very good idea and needed to pass code.

1/2 inch commercial grade copper in the railings, expensive yet a sweet touch. Copper went up 50% since I quoted the job.

The cat door what porch would be complete without one.

Small Grapevine Trellis

This trellis or arbor was built in Durham from my customers design. We incorporated the design of the very large arbor in the front yard and added the lattice panels  for screening. The intent was to get the existing grapevine to climb the trellis. We put it in a year ago and the grapevine has done well to climb onto it. They were very happy with the results too!

New Liberalhandyman blog!

This is the first post on my new Liberalhandyman blog, I had another blog hosted on my web site but it always seems the have problems and vanishes so I’ve created a new blog at World Press.

So you might ask how I came to be known as the Liberal Handyman. I started out with advertisements on Craigslist and one day I read a posting about a guy who stated he was a conservative painter and that he played Rush (the Hate Monger) and Sean Hannity on the radio as he painted. Well I laughed and thought if I’d did that everyone of my customers would kick me out of their houses. So just as a joke I posted an ad that I was the Liberal Handyman and my phone rang of the hook, so from then on I kept the name and started my new (at the time) web site www.liberalhandyman.com

In case you wanted to know several of my customers are not liberals and that is OK with me as I never push my politics or beliefs on anyone. I do try to do the best job for a reasonable price as if I was working in my own home.

My service areas are Durham, Hillsborough and Chapel Hill which are around 75% Democrat, a good fit for the Liberal Handyman.

I’m also an amateur naturalist and professional nature photographer. My photos have been published in many books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of media. My web site www.rlephoto.com is an intensive web site on the butterflies of the Carolinas and Virginias it covers all the butterflies recorded in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.