Our Concrete Home

The pandemic gave a little extra time to work on a giant project: The Pizza Oven!! Brent researched online and followed lots of YouTube tutorials to build this big beast. Years ago he built this concrete base and started to lay out the brick oven floor in the basement of the garage. We also decided to add the grass to the north side of the backyard using teeny tiny drought resistant plugs. So, in the following pictures, watch the progress of the plugs--it's like a mini time lapse!  Brent had a bit of engineering to figure out with the shape of each level of bricks. He cut and cut and cut!  Little side note: the 2019 steel retaining walls are looking nice! So fun to plant pretty zinas!  Each layer, a different size of brick.  When Brent finished the bricks, we wrapped the entire oven in 3 layers of thermal ceramic blankets. Next, the entire oven was covered in a mixture of crushed styrofoam and cement. It's kindof the texture of stucco.  The maiden voyage was on ...

ARTIFACT #1 Then... and now! ARTICIFACT #2 Then... and now!!! ARTIFACT #3 Then... and now! ARTIFACT #4 Then... and now! THEN (from close to the beginning) and NOW (Sept 2019). Sometimes it's just important to see how far we have come. It's been a decade long family project and more work to go! 

We have been in Our Concrete Home for almost seven years and we are still working on our vision. Jean-Jacques Rousseau sums up how I have felt: “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” We have waited years to figure out and finish our final retaining wall and stairs between our house and garage. It is one of the largest projects Brent has tackled at the house. But the result is OH SO SWEET!!! I can’t wait to see the walls and stairs rust up, soil perfectly amended, and beds filled with beautiful plants. It will be gorgeous! The following pictures span approximately three months:  This gives you a fairly good idea of what was originally there. Before starting the stairs and retaining wall, we had to put up more boards on the house. We still had exposed foam from the ICF blocks.  We need to paint the boards, a project for spring or sooner. Brent built another raised bed along the side of the house. I have been composting directly into that soil and the worms ...

Our grass in the back is finally making an appearance! Brent harvested plugs from our front to get our back lawn going. The strip in the front for the harvest was only about 2 feet by 4 feet and it filled all of this. Very impressive!  In the fall of 2018 he planted the little tiny plugs in a section of the backyard. By early May of 2019 this is what the tiny plugs looked like:  N ot bad! It was a summer of babysitting this patch (weeds, ugh!!!). But just this morning I took the picture below and you can see that it is filling in very well.  Pay special attention to my "rock harvesting" in the back corner of our lot. Sifting dirt makes my back ache but I am determined to have the best soil around!   Below is a photo of a patch that we did over a year ago and you can see that it does eventually fill in well. Patience and pulling (the weeds, not your hair) are key. It is so nice to cover our dust bowl in the back! Before we planted the plugs we hauled...

We continue to add to our garden. Brent built a large steel bed in the back yard and planted tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, asparagus, and cotton. He added 2 pomegranate bushes on the south side of our garage. I continue to raise pumpkins and zinnias in the front. Someday I will add the permanent landscaping, still working on amending the dirt. The pecan tree yielded 3 nuts that we were not expecting this year: My pumpkin was growing one HUGE pumpkin and we only allowed an additional 3 pumpkins to keep growing on the plant. But one very, very sad day I came out and my plant looked like this: The next day completely dead. Squash bugs. Ugh. I was very sad since I love my pumpkins!  Our grapes went crazy this year and I was able to steam/process 67 quarts of the most delicious concord grape juice ever! I was surprised to get so many quarts since it's just the third year of our grapes. We will enjoy the juice it all year long!