i got Pot ting Bench

haha! you were thinking something else weren't you?  shame on you!

after several weeks of a little weld here, a little weld there, Nacho finished my custom potting bench this past weekend.  unfortunately i don't have any 'before' pics boooo.  but the before was a combination of salvaged pallets sitting on top of salvaged landscape bricks. do you see the theme here?  as proud as i was of my salvaged goodness, i just was not confident in it's abilities to withstand a flood & that is something we have to plan for in anything we do here.  so beholdmy new potting bench!

i've got shelves for storage, a wire rack for hanging, & a wire grate (in the middle) for soil to fall through to a collection bin.  pretty nifty eh?
i still get to shout out some slavaged goodness because the boards that we used for all 3 shelves are leftover pieces of our deck build.  that stuff is pretty heavy on it's own, so this thing is unlikely to go anywhere & has already proven it can withstand a flood or two.  the wire backing is leftover cattle/hog confinement wire from the gabions.  i hate to waste anything.

so props to Nacho for a nice build & to moi for outstanding Management! now i'm free to get my garden on!

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Finis

well it only took a year but we finally finished it. and we managed to use all the concrete we'd collected. it was only fitting that i threw my back out at the end. but it was worth it! wait, no it wasn't! so here's to all the new beach we gained!  nacho couldn't be prouder. and that's 28 for those of you curious. 45 in all between the beach, the berm and the sitting wall. we figured, this is the equivalent of building your own sea wall BY HAND!!!

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how do you make a gabion?

Step1:
buy a lot of hog confinement wire from Tractor Supply. some times, just buy them out completely. they come in 16ft sections so you might want to cut them in half at TS so you can haul them in the back of THAT NEW TRUCK THAT YOU NEVER ASKED YOUR WIFE IF YOU COULD BUY!!! no photo needed cuz said wife is so over that truck!
Step2:
hire some hot chick (hey maybe that wife) to man the John Deere so you can bend them into place. drive the JD over plywood set to create the bend.

said truck can be seen in the background. that's all the coverage it's every getting here! but said wife is so over it.

Step3:

Take another piece of plywood, and, from the front, bend the front of the panel up to a 90.

and you're done! one of 2 sides

Step4:

wash rinse repeat 80 SOMETHING MORE TIMES!

or until you run through the most recent batch that you bought TS out of. in that case proceed to the other TS and buy them out too until you've made like 50 of these! tops and bottoms are made from additional panels and it's all just wired into place with a roll of heavy gauge wire like they use for securing chain-link fencing to posts. at this level, it was actually cheaper for us just to buy the big roll of wire and cut it into strips for securing the panels & tops/bottoms together.  we went through 3-4 rolls of the stuff, but we never seem to run out of uses for it (some of you saw the Bug's Life costumes several years ago)
Why Would You Build Them Yourself?
as i said in my previous post, it really is cheaper and you can customize these to any size you want. most of ours were something like 6ft long, 4ft deep/high, and 2.5ft wide (i'm sure i'm off on that and nacho will quickly correct me). but the ones we used for the Sitting Wall, were half that height. so it really gave us some flexibility that we either wouldn't have had or would have paid out the nose for. nacho's research came up to about $80 a gabion (i have no idea the size) and this was WAY cheaper - plus it was kinda fun to keep buying TS out of this stuff.

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flintstones meet them flintstones

as usual, late posting this but i think i have an acceptable excuse this time:  EXHAUSTION!!!  3 weekends ago we decided to give the beach wall a break and move our attention to the north end of our property, where the yard meets the beach. over the years, i've done 2 things here: planted a vegetable garden on the end closest to/against our patio/sea wall and planted tons of lillies on the other end (aka transition area). the idea has primarily been that the lillies would be a hold for when we flood. the truth of the matter is, they take a heck of a beating when we have beach floods - floods that don't make it over the berm and surround the house. we had 2 of those this spring/summer and my lillies did their job but they really started to suffer. at one point, i had to go next door to Ray's and pull some from the water. they'd been dislodged by the wave action we get when we have a beach flood.
so many weeks ago, on one of the design blogs i stalk follow, i found a family that had dedicated a section of their yard to a tortoise habitat. their goal was to not only provide a great living space for their pet but to make it architecturally interesting. and what did they use to make this possible? say it with me people:  GABIONS! guess who has a little experience in this area? i ran this by nacho as a great solution to the transition area and added it would make for a neat sitting wall just as the Tortoise Family had done. nacho agreed and so it was done.  we spent 2 weekends making this happen.
Sitting Wall
this is the best Before picture i have. you have to focus on the area to the left where you see the lillies and rock.

and now

Garden Wall

but we didn't stop there! after creating something that nice, it was hard to look at this

and say, "eh, just leave it". so we didn't. the 2nd weekend was spent pulling these temporary gabions out and redoing this section of the wall. it was well worth it don't 'cha think?

and so overall, we now have this!

i'd love to tell you we are all done, but remember, i said at the beginning that we decided to take a break. this past weekend while I was in The Motherland, nacho built the remaining 4 gabions to complete the Beach Wall. i'll post that work in it's entirety when it's done. 

and the last thing i'd like someone to figure out, is how much concrete do you think we've moved in all of this? we estimate, when done, we will have filled 49 gabions, give or take. the "Sitting Wall" ones are not as tall as the Berm or Beach ones, but i'd actually hate to know the exact amount of concrete we've moved, cuz you have to realize we've done most of it by hand. yes, we're crazy.

oh and the innevitable question that always comes up: can't you just buy those things? yeah, no telling what it would cost us to fill them, but nacho said it'd run us $80 minimum just to buy the cages pre-made and the wire is not near as sturdy as the wire we used in ours. perhaps he's embellishing so i don't kill him for making me do all this work!

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busy busy busy

well, i'm no help these days. a kink in the neck that started Friday left me useless all weekend. i could barely lift my glass of wine Friday night and had to take my G&T without ice cuz it was simply too heavy. but i did my best to oversee (haha) the progress on the yard. and boy did Nacho move it along!

so far we've had 4 tandem truck loads and we have 1 more coming this week. we have to finish the berm at the northmost part of the yard and just some back fill in my vegetable garden and some low spots in the yard. then it's on to planting!! hooray!

but that's not all folks. wait! there's more! because we apparently have a concrete fetish around here, nacho has decided to completely redo the "rip rap" wall on the beach. he was so taken with the ones now buried under the berm above, that we wants to be more organized about the ones on the beach. yes, NACHO WANTS TO BE MORE ORGANIZED! i'll take what i can get. so here's the beginning of what i hope to be our final relationship with busted concrete!

so that's 5 of about 25 baskets that we'll be constructing to reconstruct the rip rap wall into something more solid and appealing. i have a few photos of how we actually make the cages but when i've got complete photos for the process, i'll post them. i know, a cliffhanger. how will you ever survive. it insures you'll come back for another visit though.

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that's progress

i know i've got some HUGE gaps in time for this season and i promise i'll go back and post a catch-up type of thing. but i couldn't let this major event go by without posting Nacho's progress on the gabion wall. he rented a Dingo (his word not mine) and it did not eat our baby. instead, it built the berm. this is a big deal at our house. we're so close to getting our yard back to looking, well, like a yard. here is his hard work paying off!

and this was how it all started...

quite the contrast eh?

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and that's that!

almost 2 weeks late and not quite the full picture, but here's the gabion wall in almost it's entirety! we officially finished a week ago Sunday; or as we like to say in the South "last Wednesday week". that's letter conservation for you! congrats to nacho!

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1 of many

if i do nothing else, i can lay claim to filling the first official gabion!

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as promised

here's the finished product

and here's nacho playin'

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in the trenches

well, i don't have a photo due to the time of day that we started this little project, but i'll try and post something this week. as luck would have it (what is it about Nacho and his luck), i had to come home early yesterday cuz Cookie had a vet appointment. when i got home, i noticed Ray next door and a guy operating a tractor on Ray's beach (i have no idea what type. just the one with the big digging thingy on the front) . talking to Ray later, it seems he's digging new footings for his new sea wall - i'll have to get a picture of that at some point too cuz it's gonna be cool. we're talking about his sea wall and i mention the gabion wall that we're hoping to start digging for in a couple weekends. i mentioned we were probably going to start that by, oh joy, hand digging (i am the most awesome wife btw). then it occurred to me to ask Ray if he rented that digging thingy and where cuz maybe i could get Nacho to rent it. remember me mentioning luck? well, Ray said as long as Nacho put it back where it was parked, he was welcome to use it last night to start digging the trench for our gabion wall. since he rented it for the day, might as well get as much use out of it as possible. Nacho actually sounded excited when i called him - i'd expect nothing less of a man. so we were out there 'til about 9p digging away. i still had to do some hand digging in spots but this thing was a life saver! photo to be posted later tonight!

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