Doors, Stores, and More

I know it may not seem like a very interesting thing, but putting up the interior doors is one more step to making the house seem complete.

While right now most of the doors are still stacked up, waiting to be installed, like this,

that will start Monday.

While trim carpenter Lonnie or his assistant is doing that, the shelving in the office storage room, all three bedroom closets, the guest closet, linen closet, and another closet will go in as well. (That’s the “stores” in the title of this post–for storage.)

Another kind of storage got sorted out recently too. The original plan was to have an 1,100 gallon rainwater storage tank outside of my office, harvesting the water from the office roof and part of the shed roof.

To be honest, I never liked this option. The tank is big and blatant, and its color doesn’t go well with the rest of the house. So I asked Bill to have Rick, our local rainwater harvesting guy, bring over a different tank with a different color that I liked better. He did, and while he was at it, brought over a smaller version (600 gallons) of this original tank.

The middle tank, color-wise, looks A LOT better, but in order to store its 500 gallons with a smaller diameter, it has to be taller. Now, it could be partially sunk into the ground, but only so far, because there’s a transfer valve I’ll have to open from time to time to move water from it (or any of the others) down to the tanks under the patio. The result was that it would still stand well out of the ground and it’s got a pretty ugly top that would have to be hidden somehow.

So what about that shorter tank? Well, because it’s shorter and smaller in diameter, it’s less visible to start with, and partially sinking it would leave a lot less of it visible. Where Rick’s hand is in the photo below is where the top would actually be.

It doesn’t look a lot different in this photo but the difference is actually huge. For starters, that brown arc in front of Rick’s feet is the outline of the bigger tank. And when you compare the top of this tank, and where Rick’s hand is, relative to the pipes coming out of the wall to the bigger tank above, you start to get a sense of the differences. So that was the decision: this tank, sunk about 14″.

By the way, before we could move the big tank to see this smaller one in its place, we had to drain it! Even though it wasn’t hooked up to the drain pipes, it had still managed to capture some of our winter rains!

How much was in there? I don’t know but it wasn’t moving until we drained it, that was for sure!

Bill and I also sorted out the “decomposed granite” colors for the rest of the yard: Tombstone Brown “rip-rap” for the borders (across the top) and Palomino Gold (second from left on the bottom row) for the rest.

Compared to the house, they look the best. I’d hoped for more contrast between the border stones and the others but this is the best of what our stone supplier has.

And finally, the little walls around the front courtyard went up on Friday.

They’ll be covered with the same decorative stone as the other walls near them.

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