Outside There…

I’ve shown you a bit of inside There so now let’s take a stroll on some of the outside. 

This picture was taken from the street corner looking back towards the house.  My s.i.l. Diane and I were talking about the small pond that Carol and I had built in the front yard.  It was coming on to fall and the mums planted by the gatehouse were coming on strong.

This one was taken from our drive looking back at the pond.  Again you see the little gatehouse.  There was one on the other side of the street as well since our street was the main street into the neighborhood off one of the main streets into the downtown area of our town.

From the street looking back at the pond and the stream you can see how we stacked the individual rocks.  Carol and I would take off and drive down to Tulsa and go north on Memorial Road until we were in Bixby to a place called Hardscape Materials.  They had stacks and stacks of different rock that were priced for folks to pick from theirselves.   When we would drive into their drive we would go on a big scale that weighed us and whatever vehicle we were in and then we’d go get whatever rock we wanted, load it into our vehicle and then go back to the scale, weigh and go in and pay for whatever we got. 

Ninety percent of the rocks in this rock garden were picked because we could lift them. We did purchase a large rock and several that were almost as big as the “waterfall” rock, as we called it, and had those delivered and put into place by a bubba, but all the rest were picked and placed by Carol and me.

We decided to do a pond and rock garden in the front yard because the grass was crap.  We had planted both of the willows when they were smaller but they had grown enough that it was a fight to try to get the grass looking decent.  We had seen ponds around and decided we wanted to build a pond.  Neither of us had ever done it and so it was kind of a comedy of errors, but we toted rock, had a ball doing it and ended up with a decent little stream and a waterfall rock where the water would fall then into the pond.

This was back before I started taking pictures very much but I wanted to start with the pond.  We bought a half dump truck load of dirt, had it dumped on our driveway and Carol’s son (Jeff), our young man that helped me in the yard (Jon) and me would take a wheelbarrow load at a time and we built up from the ground because there were so many roots from the trees it was a bitch to try to dig a hole for the pond. Then we placed and mortared the rocks that we brought in from Hardscape.  Jeff would just shake his head at his mom and me when we’d take off and head to town to buy rock.

This was the beginning of what we built THERE, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and some more of my story.  The place where I left most of my heart and a lot of sweat and a great deal of fun.

Since we are in the middle of yet another move from the country into town, Norman, the next few posts are going to be sporadic but I will try not to leave you hanging for more that a couple of days.

Here And There…

And everywhere…

Well, here we go again… These next couple of posts I decided to do have to do with there. Bartlesville,  Oklahoma.  Where I really got into the gardening.  And doing home decorating.  Carol would look at me funny when I suggested the colors for the sunroom but she loved it when she saw how it was coming around.

In our home in B’ville we had a built in porch on the east side of the house.  It was not closed in  but we hired it done because of our love of plants and flowers.

  I loved this rubber plant.  We were able to have a lot of indoor plants because of this room.

I would sit in the living room in my easy chair and watch the sun move and how it shone on the different areas and on the different plants sitting around. You can see my safety glasses there by the canned air.

So I’d take my breaks and look at the whiteness of the room and I decided that I needed to paint it a very clear yellow for several reasons.  One reason was the plants would really *POP* against the yellow.

Here’s a shot of the yellow in progress.  You can see where I taped off the ceiling from the bead board above the walls.   I wanted to keep that white to give the illusion of crown moulding… wide crown moulding and also I kept the door mouldings white.  And it added a crispness to the whole room. 

Here you can see why Carol thought I had finally gone ‘round the bend, as it were… I painted the inside of the windows with a firey orange.  In the mornings and during the day it was an incredible effect, if I say so myself, and one of those rare ideas that really worked.

The ceiling I painted and sponged with three colors of green.  Carol doesn’t care for most shades of green, with the exception of  living green as in the plants and money green, but she loved the ceiling because it wasn’t just green.  The sponging almost gave a cloudy effect.

With my next post, hopefully tomorrow, I’ll take you to where this all began… You know me, I do things a little bass-ackwards.