Hiding the garbage bin - creatively

Garbage bins are unsightly but absolutely necessary. They need to be easily accessible too, meaning ours is visible from the front yard. Something simply had to be done! The solution was to literally build a mountain over it. Massive steel doors swing open to reveal the garbage bin out front and in the rear another set of steel doors hides all of the garden tools. Over top a twisty, gnarly tree 'grows' majestically. The tree was built in our shop some years ago and now at last we are working on the mountain underneath. The planters on the sides and up on top will grow real greenery as well.

Along with the mountain is almost 200 feet of 'heavy plank' fence which will be sculpted from concrete and then painted to look like wood. Sculpted concrete trees (with real vines providing the greenery) will anchor each end. Light posts with soft glow LED lighting will be built in every twenty feet. This fence will never rot as it is built with a sturdy welded steel framework which is covered with galvanized lath. A thick coat of fibreglass reinforced concrete will be sculpted over that.The fence will be finished like another fence we did on the opposite side of the property. (shown below)

Last piece of trim

We've been chipping away at the final details of the house for two years now, sometimes a little more aggressively than others. The final trim pieces for the outside of the house came off the router some weeks ago and have been worked on during rainy days when we need to be in the shop. But it's been a nice fall without many rainy days. The painting and glazing were finished earlier this week and today was the perfect day to do the final install. The last area to get it's trim was the large front window. That meant setting up a scaffold and trimming each piece perfect and then screwing it into place. Once I was done Jenessa filled the holes and touched up the paint finishing things off nicely. One more thing is off the to-do list.

Levitate!

Portfolio pieces in our shop are worked on a little at a time. The 2016 Sign Challenge entry falls into that category. They are placed on a table between the studio and the shop taunting me all day to get my regular work done so I can sneak in five minutes here and there as a well earned reward. Yesterday the white plastic lenses were fit into place and some sculpting epoxy was used to permanently secure them there. Today I managed two coats of silver paint on the levitator devices. I also wired up a transformer to test various colour LED lights. The crew voted for the blue and I agreed. With the LEDS choice decided it will next be time to begin preliminary assembly of the vehicles. Stay tuned...