Dogability Ramp v2.0

Back in January I built a little handicap ramp for my elderly doggo, Shelly, who has bad back knees.  She's in great health in general, it's just that she's the dog equivalent of 96 years old.  She couldn't step down from the threshhold onto the patio at the old house, and would often just fall out the door to the outside.  The ramp made all the difference in the world, and it worked great...right up until we moved house. So, over the weekend, I built her a new one.

The plan - in which about half of the measurements are off, but I fixed them as I worked. 

Here's the old ramp.  It was covered with an Ikea bathmat for traction (which constantly slipped off and had to be adjusted daily). The structure, if you want to call it that, was just a leftover piece of plywood screwed to a 2x4 stack of 2" sticks.  It wasn't stable anymore, and without a flat landing, and because of the very steep slope,  the front of the dog was headed downhill before the back of the dog even got out of the door - which caused her to fall and smack her face on the ground. :( 

The new ramp:

• is an inch taller
• has a complete frame with internal support to prevent the ramp sagging
• has a 14" landing to step out onto before going down (for dogs' and humans' safety), and 
• has a non-skid coating all the way around for traction for the dogs and to prevent the ramp sliding on the patio surface

LR-:  parts cut out;  frame assembled; frame clad with plywood

After hemming and hawing over how best to make this new ramp grippy so Shelly won't slide down it (stair tread safety tape, another math mat, adhesive non-skid shower floor stickers, etc.), I opted to coat the entire thing in Rustoleum's Truck Bed Liner spray.  It's solid stuff, and two coats of it were enough to pretty effectively rubberize the entire surface, making it slip-proof.  It was also much cheaper than any other options, at $7 per can.

Turns out, even grippy truck bed liner spray was too slippery for Ol' Sheller...or maybe it's just that she just doesn't like new things.  Either way, neither she nor Daisy would walk on the ramp AT ALL. Shelly felt trapped outdoors, and Daisy just jumped over the whole thing, which was pretty impressive, I have to say.

So, I picked up a gigantic, $20 shop rug from Blowe's, and cut a piece from it to the shape of the ramp.  Now both dogs use it as if it'd always been there. Whew!

Sure, the thing is huge, dark, and kind of an eyesore. But it helps my dog. And it's awfully comfortable to walk up and down for me, too.  I'm no spring chicken myself, you know? The landing at the top makes a HUGE difference in walkability and comfort.  I wish I'd thought to make it wider, as wide as the door, but I was working with the size plywood I had.   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Incidentally, this is both (a) what I looked like while I was building and spraying the ramp; and (b) how I looked when my new duplex-neighbors rolled up to their new place for the first time.  HR! R'M LRRA!!  *gloved handshake* 

That's all, folks! 

♥♥ Dog of my heart ♥♥

Leafy Goodness

Work on the bathroom continues.  Thankfully, it's been operational for a few days now, and we're just waiting for the crew to come back towards the end of this week to finish the cosmetic details (trim, wall texture, paint).

Meanwhile, I thought I'd show off my favorite spot in the house:  the back patio.  It's nothing fancy, it's just relaxing, pretty, and unbelievably comfortable. 

Just enough shade, just enough light, and lots of turquoise and green.

I literally dumped all of my houseplants out here when we moved, since there wasn't enough space near the windows inside.

It was accidental, but the result is a soft, green patio space I LOVE to relax in in the evenings.

Daisy says hi.

I may hang one or two of the plants, just to keep the entire patio from happening on the ground.  Maybe a bell. 

Definitely some string lights. 

Further down the side yard (I promise I wasn't just backing down the property with a camera in hand, lol), it's...less attractive.  

Definitely in need of some hose management.  

Other than that...?  I haven't had a chance to even think about it yet. 

Turn and face the other way, and there's the yard. 

Shaded, green, sheltered, and quiet. 

The backyard is actually shaped like this, which is weird.  

But it's tiny, so, easy to mow.  (I mean, I don't have to mow it, but I imagine it's easy to do). 

The other day it rained, and this little green fox-face appeared in the algae on the wood of the fence near the patio area.  Hee! 

I was worried that my indoor plants wouldn't survive the transition to the patio, but not only have they all come through like champs, some are even thriving out there - including this wee Jade plant, which came completely out of its pot and was kicking around the floor of my car all afternoon, and which I just shoved back into the dirt with my thumb.  Just a few days later, and it's totally happy.  Yay! 

That's all the patio I've got for now; I'll be back soon with house pics, and maybe updates to the patio.  See ya! 

Accessibility Design for Doggos

The time has come, my furry friend, to put you up on blocks.

No wait, scratch that.

This is Shelly! 

Shelly is 15 (approx. 90 in human years, for a doge her weight/age/breed).  She old.  And her poor joints - especially her knees - have been aching her something fierce this past year.  At her vet's urging, she went on a diet about a month ago, and began taking supplements for her joints.  It's helped quite a bit already; but the step down from the back door into the patio area was still really difficult for her.  Watching my girl try and try and try, and shake, and stumble, was just too heart-breaking!

So, a few weeks ago, I rounded up some scraps from the garage - a leftover shelf board from the built-in shelf project and a couple of short 2x4s - and made my poor doge a handicap ramp.  It's a very simple design - just a board on top of a 2x4 with another 2x4 under the middle for support.  Here's my very detailed scale diagram, which I made during the planning process:

Both of the doges were vv heckin confuse:

"wut"

After many minutes of tentative tries, first with one foot, then another - and Daisy finally just leaping over the thing - I realized that they were confused because the smooth wood was too slippery.  I dropped a soft bathmat onto it (with a non-slip backing), and that solved the problem.  It took Shelldog a couple of days to get used to it; now she trots up and down the ramp with ease.

bathmat is...bathmatty.

Although this works great for the dogs, I've since discovered that the ramp is WAY too short to be safe for humans.  The angle is far too steep.  For now, it works for Shelly, and that was the point.  Sometime before the warmer weather shows up, though, I'd like to replace the ramp with a much longer one, with a proper non-skid surface on top, so that neither Shelly nor I ends up on our face on the ground.

More soon!

Back In Action. Lots and Lots of Action.

I haven't been on the blog much the past month.  There were some personal things I had to take care of that occupied 100% of my time for a few weeks; and at the moment I'm neck-deep in a few different projects.  So far, I don't have much to show you, but I figured I'd at least tell you what's going on:

1. Refinishing A Corner Desk 

Once upon a time, someone ruined a perfectly good piece of furniture.  I'm not normally one of the "Never ever paint wood!" people.  I prefer stained to painted, it's true, but I know that either can be done well and produce an attractive piece.  This desk is neither of those things. 

It's a five-legged corner desk with a drawer, made of solid walnut, which was once stained (badly) and then painted (badly!!)  twice.  The paint job is full of drips and mucky thick spots; the top of the desk is cracked all over, which could be age, or lack of proper surface prep in the paint process, or both.  Also, the original drawer was, at one time, replaced at one time with a badly-constructed one made of cheap pine. It doesn't fit the desk well, and is so thick-walled and over-engineered you'd think someone was using it to store very small explosives.

Regardless, overall, it's a potentially gorgeous piece. The walnut wood itself is in great shape, and so far, it's stripping nicely, so I'm hopeful that I can restore this thing to its former glory.  I have no idea how old the desk is - I think at least 80s, maybe 70s (?)  The hardware is oddly shaped, and blackened and rusted with age; but it's sound, and so far I've been able to clean most of it up pretty well.  I haven't seen a maker's mark yet that might give me a clue as to where and when it came from;  I'm hoping I'll find it buried under paint. I hope it wasn't on that missing drawer.

2.  Repurposing the Bicycle Storage Area Dining Room

The desk is part of an ongoing repurposing of the dining room.  Let's be real here:  I don't use a dining room, or own  any dining room furniture.  I eat in front of the TV.  So  I've got this big, empty room which is flooded with natural light, and adjacent to both the kitchen and the living room.  It's well-lit, and there's a ceiling fan. 

Oh, hey, look!  There's that corner desk in the picture, behind my mountain bike.  

Anyway, 90% of the things that were stuffed into this room temporarily have been removed to other locations, and this room is about to become a(nother) shared creative space - a room where I can set up my big easel and start painting again, and where Sylvan can sit and work on her novels on days she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  I'm also about to start remodeling and refinishing a table for her to use as a writing desk. 

3.  Creating An Outdoor Entertaining Space From Scratch

I used to have a really pretty, comfortable back porch space, many years ago.  I'm not entirely sure what happened to it over the years, but, new house: new awesome patio.  Right now I'm only window-shopping (my last surviving patio chair is on it's last legs), hunting around for patio furniture and decorative stuff. 

The Zilker Garden Festival is this weekend.  I haven't been in a few years, but it's an AWESOME little weekend event, and I plan to come home with many, many plants for the patio - decorative flowery things, vegetables for a container garden, maybe a small potted tree? 

Y'all, I bought my very first leafblower this week.  Do you live in central Texas, or somewhere else chock full of Live Oak Trees?  Then you feel me when I say: fuck those messy, crusty, little oak flowers!  And all that nasty, sticky, yellow pollen!!  UGH.  The mountains of stiff leaves aren't helping anybody, either.  They're not even terribly good for compost, because they're so thick and hard that they take forever to break down.  Those leaves and crunchy little flower strings are about to become my bitch.   

I'll have updates over the next couple of weeks on how all this is going.  I'm hoping the corner desk will come first.  I'm having a lot of fun working on it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out! 

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Meanwhile, wanna see a gross spider pic?  I thought you would: 

This is Frances.  Frances is a Funnel Web spider (Agelenidae) who lives on my front porch. She's about an inch long, and occupies a corner right next to the front door, by the doorbell.  Needless, perhaps, to say: people don't ring my doorbell anymore. 

Frances is harmless to people (she's not related to the Australian Funnel Web spiders you may have heard about).  She enjoys collecting dead bugs and hiding behind the trim on the siding, and usually cleans out her web long before it reaches this embarrassing state.  Bad Frances. 

Frances has an upstairs neighbor named Rapunzel who has a web about three feet up the wall.  I don't know what kind of spider she is.  She's much pointier in the leg and rounder in the body, and a bit larger.  I think she's some sort of false widow, but I haven't gotten a really good look at her just yet. 

Anyway, back soon!

Oh, No, They Didn't.

The people down the street from my house are constantly outdoors, working on their yard and gardens, which are, of course, *gorgeous*.  I admit, when the two-story next to them came up for sale, I went to the open house just so I could get on the top floor and look out the window down into their backyard to see what it looks like.  Gorgeous!

So, when I saw them doing Something Very Serious in the yard over the holiday weekend, I was mightily intrigued.  A huge area of ground in front of the porch and front garden had been de-sodded, raked and pounded flat, and was marked out with  twine - what was going on??

Yesterday morning on my way to work I saw what they did there -  they'd made a little extension to their front porch with a Quikcrete Walkmaker.  Same thing I used to make the stones on my back patio:

laying down the "stones" for the first time, with the Walkmaker, in 2006

new arrangement of the same "stones", in 2010

I'm a huge fan of the Walkmaker;  but not such a huge fan of how my "stones" came out.  Sure, they look nifty, but when I poured them, I used concrete in the molds instead of cement.  The difference being that concrete is cement with aggregate -  gravel - mixed in, which makes the material stronger, but also makes it extremly rough underfoot.  My patio is NOT for walking on with bare feet, and it makes me sad to have made this mistake.

And sure enough, as slowed down to get a better look at my neighbors' project, being the Nosy Nancy that I am, they'd done the exact same thing - I could see the bumply, rumply concrete texture even from my car window.  Oh no!  I hope they don't plan to walk on that patio with bare feet!

Looks great, though. :)


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More Ideas For Projects I'm Never Going To Get Around To

So, that back patio of mine...

ooh, ahh.

Wouldn't be awesome if it looked like that, but with grass in between the stones?  Actually, it does.  And it's fantastic when I remember to take the weedeater to it every week, but who has time for yardwork? 

::crickets::

But looking pretty cool doesn't solve the real problem with it, which is that the stones are (a) really, really, really rough underfoot (because I didn't smooth out the concrete enough when I made them, and I should've used cement anyway, NOT concrete, because it's full of tiny rocks! Ow!)   Also, (c), I'm actually kinda bored with it.  And (d) if I'm going to have to dig some of it up to put up posts for a pergola-type-thing overhead...why not just scrap the whole thing and do something new? 

With me? Awesome.

So I keep seeing stuff like this...

O_O

And this...

if my toes could drool...

I mean, really, can't you just feel that soft, smooth wood under your bare feet?  I really wish I could find the photo I'm thinking of - I saw one not too long ago that's *gorgeous* and *perfect*, but did I bookmark/pin/save it?  Hell no.

It was little more than a "Hey, that's neat", until I remembered that in my hoard stash in the garage, I've got two buckets of black marble chips, another bucket of stones in assorted sizes/colors that have been in and out of gardens and fishtanks for years, a huge pile of lumber that's technically usable but which I know I won't ever really build anything with, including a couple of small heavy timbers and some end-grain pieces, a couple of spare bags of sand (for re-doing the base underneath the patio)...and I think I have some weed-blocking cloth in there somewhere, but I'm not sure. I even have a couple of gallons of deck sealant/stain sitting around in my paint hoard supplies.  Even if I have to buy more weed-blocking cloth, that's an entire project for like $20, done almost entirely with stuff I already have.

see also: breezy net sheers, moroccan lantern, hanging plants, live grass, time to do all this

Yeah?

Like I have time to do that.  But it's a neat idea.


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Inspiration Strikes When and Where It Will

For a bit of fun on this gorgeous Friday afternoon, I thought I'd share with you where I got the inspiration for the layout on my patio. 

In 2006 I used the Quikrete Walkmaker to make a concrete patio on the back of the house.  This is what it looked like the day it was finished:

Hey, look, I actually had grass before I had dogs...

(It didn't actually dip in the center like that -  I had to splice two photos together to get this shot).  The border around the edge would become a "hedge" of herbs surrounding the patio with green and lovely scents and lots of bees. 

Last year, tired of cracking mortar, weeds, and upset stones from the ground settling, I chipped out the entire thing, fixed the grade of the sub-surface, and laid the stones in a more organic pattern; intending to allow the grass to fill in between the stones, which would (a) create a softer, prettier surface to walk on, and (b) allow Nature to take its course on the patio instead of trying to fight it every step of the way.  This is what it looked like the day I finished it:

You can see here the GIANT Rosemary bush on the upper right, which was *tiny* in the first picture;  the little tree behind it is my Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana),  which is the plant in the pot on the lower left in the first picture - barely a stick then!

it does have grass between the stones now, by the way

Another shot of the stones, which are arranged in concentric circles beginning at the four corners of the patio that meet at the edges like ripples in a pond. You can see the herb border fully grown in here - this was taken about a month before that Raging Death Fungus of Doom ripped through my entire garden and killed everything last year.  Sadface. :(

But here's the fun part:  the inspiration for the stone layout:

I have no idea who these players are, but they're totally cheating.

Heeheehee.  This is a screenshot from the game Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for Playstation (yes, Playstation *one*).  Specifically, this is the Lich's crypt, the Lich being the Big Bad Guy at the end of the first segment of the game.  I love this old game, and I still play it all the time;  and I've always loved the stones in the grass on the floor of this level.  Ever since I first saw it I've wanted to make a little grassy stony patio like it.   Obviously mine's a bit different, but this is where I got the idea.

LOL.   :)



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A plant! I've got a plant!

Before:

no shit, that wall planter's been empty for six years

After:

can you spot the zip-top baggie in this picture?

That's right:  a zip-top baggie.  The planter's a weird shape, and it's terra cotta, which means it's dry as a bone, even though it's painted most of the way around (all but the back) - and that Schefflera needs moisture.  Moisture that would ruin the fake-ceramic-glaze paint job on the pot.

Solution:  a 1-gallon plastic zip-top baggie, with three rows of small drainage holes poked into the bottom, inserted into the pot's opening and filled with soil - basically lining the pot with plastic.  It drains well, but not too much, and the plastic is practically invisible under the foliage.  I put a few rocks on top of the soil in the pot to keep it from washing away when I water it. 

Microsoft Paint: kickin' it old school

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