So we decided--and by we, I mean "I"--that we need to have something similar at our house. We don't have a backyard as such, but we do have little area in front of the house that "overlooks" the yard proper. So we--and I mean "I"--decided that that would be the place to have our own porch, although since we love Hawaii so much, we're calling it our lanai.
The goal is to have a flat, stone surface with a big fire-pit in the center. As the lanai approaches the dropoff, it will actually end and have a strip of land there for planting flowers, etc. Then a short stone wall will butt up against the face of the dropoff, and extend above the top to make a sort of bench for sitting / resting drinks, etc.
We batted some ideas around and we finally got to work--and by we, I mean "Russ." He loves this sort of thing so it has kept him busy, and filthy, and happy. We've been taking pictures of the process in order to put up a full album of the process, but since this blog needs a new entry, I've decided to post just a few pics as a preview.
Here's the beginning of the process. You can see the porch / steps of the house that lead down to the circular drive. Across the drive is the grassy area complete with the hideous stumps of two old, rotten trees that used to be there. When they were present, they continually threatened to fall over and demolish the house, so we had them cut down. Once the trees were gone, however, the stumps have thrived and refuse to budge / die. Russ has put down some timbers to delineate the work area.
One of our first efforts is to get rid of the stumps. One is all knotted and hard, and makes the chainsaw smoke. The other is just a pain. Chopping / cutting them is slow, using stump removing chemicals is slower, and Russ doesn't want to pay to have someone come grind them down. So, one of the first orders of business was to try to burn the easy one out.
Pretty! But less than successful. Now we have a half-burned stump shell at the edge of the lanai. We'll continue to work on it. Meanwhile Russ gets busy digging out the grass and dirt and building up the wall / dropoff.
There's the lovely stump on the left...and the other one on the right. He imagines he's going to incorporate them into the overall design somehow. I imagine that I--and by I, I mean "I"--will be paying a lot of money to get the stump grinders to come out and get rid of those hateful things.
Here's where we are at the moment. The working area is pretty well leveled out. We've--and by "we" this time, I actually mean "we"--have sort of settled on the idea of tossing out some random colored marbles amongst the stones of the lanai and firepit. Where the right-hand, gnarly stump is we're going to put in a barbeque grill because Russ loves to cook on one. And where there right-hand, half-burned stump is, we're going to eventually put in a hottub / jacuzzi. So, in the picture above, Russ is digging a 3-foot deep trench under the driveway to run water and electricity to the thing.
And that's all you get for now! The full set of pictures will appear (or be linked to) when it's done!
