Gazebo and Downspouts

We have had a helluva time here this year. I had surgery surgery, then my wife had an emergency hospitalization, where we were told she had cancer, shelf sign, which is a sign for metastasized cancer, and two docs and a surgeon told us to prepare for the worst.

However, my wife is okay, and pathology came back in our favor. No cancer! However, she has to have surgery and remove her gallbladder, and let’s just say the last 6 months have been a lot of worry!

This means I never did get my garden up and running, but I have still been picking at my projects. Yesterday I finished the gazebo on the front deck.

The problem is that we live in the Pacific Northwest and we don’t have a covered entry. It rains a lot here so coming in from the car with groceries, or home from work, you get poured on while trying to get in.

A cheap canvas pop top awning just won’t work here because we live in a windy tunny of land and it’s a rare day we don’t have at least a breeze, and it picks up suddenly and anything canvas will be ripped to shreds very shortly. I tried it on the back deck, and it lasted two seasons.

Instead I found an aluminum roofed gazebo on Amazon. (Not an affiliate link, just what I used.) Its normal price was somewhere around $1400 to $1600, and my Camel Camel Camel website alert let me know last spring it went on sale for $799. Sale gazebo was a go! I bought it, and got the initial frame done before my own surgery in March.

It took me forever to heal, and I knew the roof was going to be a pain in the butt so I procrastinated. Well, procrastinate no longer! I got the roof up. It was every bit a pain in the butt as they said, and I gave up and re-drilled a few holes because they just wouldn’t line up for me no matter what kind of trouble shooting I did. That seemed to do the trick, and it’s up and done.

The good thing was this company makes really good products. They gave me extra hardware for everything, and it’s sturdy and feels like real quality. It should last quite a while.

You might notice that while it’s 8 feet tall, it dips down on the edges by the front door. I decided to remove my screen door, because it’s not a huge value to me over having a covered porch option. I mean, sure, that’s a little janky, but it works out fine.

My next steps are to get a storage bench instead of the blue tarp wrapped potting bench to hide packages in, and a couple chairs and a table. Oh, and a few bird feeders. We really like those.

Next on my agenda was the down spouts. I have two, that have been cut off short, and dump right into my foundations. I needed a temporary solution so I opted for some cheap extenders.

When I looked at it, it appeared like the spout was cut short, and that isn’t great for water management on the property. This one in the picture is in my gravel driveway. Ignore the carpet of weeds. There’s a bare inch of gravel with no weed barriers and it needs to be redone. We are waffling on returning this area back to the back yard when we no longer have to park a Kia Soul back there because of theft risks.

This was a cheap option to get us through until we can make decisions on how to do a more permanent fix. Putting in a drain and whatnot is likely, but I have to wait until we know what we are doing with the area.

Not a huge amount done, and I am sorely missing my garden, but things are being slowly improved around here.