A good weekend for a project, or a good weekend project.
My wife came up with a plan this spring to make the vegetable garden more attractive. We first put in a long flower bed in front of it (56' x 5'). I say "we", but all I did was till it up several weeks ago with the tractor. She planned it, planted it, and mulched it. This area included leaving a blank section for a pergola to mark the entrance to the garden. Well about a week ago she told me we were building the pergola this weekend. So most of the week I had started thinking about how to build it.
I told her to let me know what she wanted, she told me to look out on the internet for ideas. She really didn't have much on the input for the design. We did negotiate the size, she first wanted the full width of the double gate, but we ended up with a 6' x 3' footprint. This worked better with the material, and scale. On Thursday evening I drew it up my design. And this is what I came up with.
pergola1.jpg
On Friday I was off from work, so we went to the lumber yard to get lumber in the morning. By Friday evening we had the two uprights in it their holes and leveled and squared up.
On Saturday morning, we went to Home depot to get the landscape timbers to line the rest of the planting beds. She spent the rest of the morning cutting and screwing together the timbers (We used the timberlok fasteners), while I made all of the top pieces for the pergola.
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On Sunday I finished out the pergola by building and installing the side frames. Later on went to the garden center and bought some riverstone (and landscape fabric) to fill in the walk area under the pergola. Later on there will be a yellow climbing roses planted on each side, along with a blue clematis vine. The rose will be trained on to the pergola, and the clematis uses the rose as a trellis.
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I'm kind of happy on how this turned out. Given the short lead time to build, I think it came out quite well, the proportions are just right.
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