Ghost bike, ghost warehouses

I came upon two eerie sights this week near one of Houston's most iconic intersections.  This was the first one.

Where a single road is torn asunder, so too was a human being.  

It's a ghost bike.  It stands for this January incident in which a man was struck dead on the nearby bridge and thrown into the confluence of Brays and Buffalo Bayous.   

Tap to expand.  Ghost bike explainer screengrabbed from www.ghostbikes.org. 

The Houston ghost bike map confirms the identity of the person and the hit-and-run circumstances of his death.

I wonder why none of the deaths on the southeast side of town have been memorialized?

Also see Bike Houston for information on local efforts to reduce fatalities such as these.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

The other eerie sight was located almost within eye-shot of the Harrisburg ghost bike, and was this:

Those ghostly old warehouses that are sandwiched between the train tracks and the Houston Ship Channel are being torn down.  View from East Navigation Blvd., which is lined with live oak trees such as the one in the shadowy foreground here. You can see a yellow excavator behind the tank car, as the end of this warehouse is removed.    

One wall still standing.  I was sorta hoping that at least one Jackie Chan-type movie would be filmed here before these unusual warehouses met with their demise.  

What are (or were) these buildings?  It might be nice to learn something about them in the thirty-six remaining seconds that they have here on earth.  I know from casual conversations with folks that they are informally referred to alternately as "the old coffee warehouses" or "the old cotton warehouses" (I suspect the latter is closer to the truth), but I can find very little of their history on the internet, other than some nonspecific references and old aerial photos that include them.

One thing is clear - they are older than old, older than most other development in this area.  This is a public domain pic of the Houston Ship Channel (available via the UH archives). The warehouses are those solid masses roughly in the center of the photo.  That straight diagonal line you see to the left of the warehouses is East Navigation.  

Unfortunately, the curator hasn't done such a great job of estimating the age of that photo, narrowing it down to a period of 106 years (duh).  But with the north side of the channel still being partially forested (!!), the actual age could be closer to the first date than the second.  This reference has a similar photograph (partially view-able in Google Books) suggesting it was taken around 1930. 

Very roughly what the same view looks like today, showing full development all along Rio Buffalo.

Tilted, screengrabbed, and rotated from Google Earth.  

Warehouses (center of photo) as seen in a recent photo on Google Earth.  

Anyway, unless an investigative source such as @HoustoniaMag decides to look into it from a history / human interest perspective, we may never know the story of what is now crashing to the ground in a poof of ghostly dust.

Well, you could, but you wouldn't be very successful.

Chan had a talent for identifying movie scene locations that were as exotic as they were decrepit.  These old warehouses would certainly have fit that bill.  

Best upholstery and drapery shop in Houston

My opinion:  Perfect Windows at 3035 Fondren Road in Houston. 

It apparently has no website, but if you Google the name, you'll find yellow pages-style business listings on the internet. 

Curiously, it also has no real name on the storefront - just this distinctive symbol combination which is apparently meant to signify the letters "PW" for "Perfect Windows", but the "W" looks more to me like an old-style mustache than a stylized drapery swag.  As I was evaluating shops up and down Fondren, I came to think of this one as "that store wearing the mustache". 
:-)

Screengrabbed from Google Street View. 

One of these classics.  "Old West Mustache" screengrabbed from this Gentleman's Emporium offering where, sadly, it is currently listed as "sold out". 

Let me explain the reasons for my choice of Perfect Windows.  (And as always, I accept no compensation for recommending any given business or venue.  This post reflects my personal opinions and experiences only, and yours may differ.) 

Every consummate greater-Houstonian knows that, if you want to maximize the quality of your time in this place, you must step out of your comfort zone.  Like a seventeen-year cicada crawling from the bowels of the Earth, you need to emerge from your suburban community and actually head downtown once in a while. 

Come into urban enlightenment.  Trust me - it never fails to be a revealing experience. 

Cicada screengrabbed from this site. 

This is particularly true if you are looking for unique items that do not fit narrowly-defined suburban stereotypes, which was the case with me as I was searching for new upholstery for a chair.  We do have fabric and upholstery shops in the Houston 'burbs, places such as Hancock Fabrics and JoAnn Fabrics, and for many projects, sources like those will meet your needs.  But here's the limitation, in my opinion:  The chains are very formulaic and very traditional.  They sell the same-old-same-old.   If you're looking for something new and unique, you might not find it at any of those common retail outlets.

Hence Fondren Road.  The best of what Houston offers in the way of home furnishings diversity is arguably found on Fondren Road and in the encompassing Harwin wholesale district.  I find Fondren itself to be the best for unique furniture and furniture-related services.  Despite the no-frills appearance to the neighborhood, a lot of high-end retailers can actually be found there.  But the bargain places are also there.  So whenever I need something that I can't find anywhere else, my "Fondren Footwork" begins:  I cruise along the street previewing shop after shop until I finally hit pay dirt. 

For my current upholstery project, I was searching for fabrics that were transitional to mid-century modern or contemporary in style, rather than the traditional offerings that tend to dominate suburban retail outlets. 

Furthermore, I was searching for a retailer who actually had product in stock so that I could take good-sized swatches home with me (which is not possible when you are forced to order based solely on samples), and also so that I wouldn't have to wait weeks and weeks for material to be shipped in from some far-off location before the craftspeople could even begin my re-upholstery job.

Um, no.  It's too difficult to get any sense of the overall effect if you can't unroll a bolt of it and view it on a furniture-sized scale.  And of course you can't cut swatches from samples like these.

Screengrabbed from an eBay listing. 

Here are the things that convinced me to choose Perfect Windows:

• They had product in stock - LOTS of it - it's a huge store.  And a good subset of that product was transitional to modern in style. 
• The yardage prices were really good compared to other outlets I had visited. 
• They were not stingy with their swatches.  They handed me a pair of scissors and invited me to go to town taking what I needed.  I'll show my swatches at the end of this post.  You can tell from looking at the selvage edges and threads that I was able to take large enough pieces to get a good idea of what each upholstery would look like in my own home. 
• I got a good vibe.  Everyone in the store was working hard.  They were obviously racking up a lot of orders which meant that they had a customer base who trusted them. 
• They were organized.  Every order was explicitly described on paper with a swatch of the customer's chosen upholstery or drapery fabric stapled to the page so that there would be no miscommunication. 
• The labor quote I received was certainly not cheap, but it was lower than what I had been offered elsewhere. 
• They quoted me just a 2-week turnaround and then delivered within 10 days, in contrast to the weeks and weeks of waiting that characterize some other retailers.  The work appeared to be done in-house rather than farmed out to subcontractors. 
• The quality of the work I received was really good.  I'll describe that in a separate post. 

Anyway, here are my swatches, so that you can get a feel for some of the more transitional stock that they had, at least as of the day of my order in December 2013.  For this project, I was re-upholstering a standalone family room chair.  Given that the workpiece was smaller, I was at liberty to consider bolder and less conventional fabrics, which would not have been the case if it had been a huge couch, for instance.  There's an unwritten rule in interior design that says you're allowed to have one outrageous piece per room, for the fun of it.  I was intentionally trying to make this particular chair un-boring, which is why I narrowed down my initial contenders to these:

Rather guttural and reminiscent of an algal mat, but I describe my style as 'organic industrial', so this was a possibility.

Oooooh!!!  Jetsons style!!  Love this!!!  But unfortunately, the hue and saturation were so similar to our family room floor rug that this fabric wouldn't have allowed the chair to stand out. 

Look at the wool rug beneath the doggie blanket.  See what I mean??  The chair would have ended up being camouflaged if I had used that wonderful upholstery above.  It would blend right into the rug. 

Screengrabbed from this post. 

Similarly with this swatch, I loved the style of it, but the tones and pattern would have been too similar to the existing rug.  As my order was being processed, another buyer picked this material for their custom drapery order.  Nice choice. 

This was really too traditional but I brought a swatch of it just in case. 

This was really too contemporary but I brought a swatch of it just in case. 

My husband and daughter both loved this one, but it was too similar to our existing couch, which you can also see in the doggie photo above. 

If you know anything about Shipibo tribal art, this one ought to resonate with you. 

It's certainly consistent with an organic industrial theme, but again, not much of a stand-out from the area rug and not ideal for a dark corner with a north-facing window (i.e., cold light). 

Circles are one of my design themes, so I had to see how this one looked. 

Of course there's my whole gardening vibe as well, so some metallic leaves were worth considering...

Definitely different, but I was afraid it would look a little too 80's retro and wouldn't coordinate with the couch. 

Industrial similar to the other geometric above, with the same problems. 

And guess what??  This became my winner. 

Yes, I did, in fact, reupholster a chair in a very non-traditional discontinuous oddly-geometric-polka-dot-slash-Lego hybrid design.  For a description of those results, you'll have to wait for a near-future post.  In the meantime, I offer you my fondest wishes for your own emerging Fondren adventures.

:-)

"Here" being outside of the suburban security headspace.

One result of the search string 'annoying cicada meme'.  Screengrabbed from www.quickmemes.com

Epic racism

It really, really chaps my rear end when I have to get important and mainstream Houston news by way of the "Epic Sh*t" Facebook group instead of through what are supposed to be the conventional, respectable channels of journalism.

I read Houston Chronicle daily, including the paid subscriber portions, and I saw not one word on the story of Landry Thompson, who traveled to Houston with her dance instructors and was forcibly taken into CPS custody despite overwhelming evidence that her circumstances were proper.

Furthermore, when I search the Chronicle online edition, I find no hits involving her name.

Screengrabbed from www.chron.com's search engine.

I can, however, get the story from HuffPost.  I can get it from ABC's Good Morning America - but apparently not from the ABC affiliate KTRK (which dominates our local TV market, by the way). 

Silencio.  What's up with that, exactly??  ABC can't claim that they didn't possess the content, because they broadcast it nationally. 

Screengrabbed from KTRK. 

This was an incredibly important local story last week, and apparently only KHOU had the guts and the conscience to report it.

"Only on KHOU" indeed.  Screengrabbed from Facebook. 

This story was incredibly important for two reasons:

(1)  Because HPD really screwed up.  There is no excuse for what they did to these people.  And then they compounded their unbelievable screw-up by intentionally NOT issuing a proper apology!!

(2)  Because this could have been an excellent teaching moment for the public in more ways than one, instead of being something that the local news media seems to have buried  - why? - because they don't want Houston or HPD to look bad so maybe it's best to sweep it under the rug?  Or far worse, maybe because they think that there was really no story here?!

These young people did everything correctly, and their civil rights were still violated, in my opinion. 

Most importantly, they were traveling with a notarized custody document.  That's the big missed opportunity for public education here.  Properly-presented news coverage could have given the public more information on this vital tool which is designed to eliminate confusion and ambiguity on exactly this kind of situation. 

And on that subject, I myself can speak from experience.  I have a daughter whose last name is different from mine, who isn't the same color as I am, and who doesn't strongly resemble me.  Particularly when we travel abroad, we always travel with a notarized document from her other biological parent explaining that she's properly in the custody of me and/or whatever larger group she is with (I can't tell you what law or rule compels this practice, because I only learned to do it by word of mouth from other people with similar family complexities). 

Racial profiling does work both ways, eh?  Of course, it's absolutely nowhere near as common for a white woman to be profiled as a black man, but it does happen.   Over the years, I have been interrogated.  It always starts with the same suspicious question:  "What is the relationship of this child to you?!"  And it always proceeds with the same initial answer:  "I gave birth to her."  If I'm feeling a bit puckish that day, I might volunteer that I delivered her naturally after only 12 hours of labor, which is unusually short for a first pregnancy in an ass-less American white woman (translation: small pelvic structure), but I was very physically fit and so it was an efficient process. 

But it doesn't matter how much TMI I provide.  More than once, the historical result has been a furious glare as the "authority" mentally embraces his or her default belief:  That it's more likely that I'm one of those sinister rich bitches who trafficked the defenseless child of color out of the third world so that I could chain her to my toilet and use her for slave domestic labor for the next fifty years of her life.

Unlike the young people in last week's news story, I've never been pushed beyond the initial phase of interrogation.  Maybe its because of that expectant look on my face that always says, "Go ahead - make my day."

I do hope that the Thompson family decides to litigate in this situation.  I certainly would if I were in their position, but that's an individual decision and a tough call either way.  It probably wouldn't gain them that much personally, but it would do a tremendous favor for American society by publicly emphasizing that not all young black men are criminals.  And not all unusual child custodians are criminals, either. 

Major, major kudos to KHOU in stepping up to the plate on this one. Here's their initial coverage:

Houston anti-hype

For a number of years after I first moved to Houston, I didn't know any better and I listened to people when they told me not to go outside. 

Houston was where people moved for a low cost of living and great jobs, but that was all it had to recommend it, they said.  Houston was hot.  Humid.  Full of mosquitoes.  They'd give you diseases like St. Louis encephalitis.  Howard Hughes famously said of Houston, "the whole place is just pestilential swamp" and he didn't even live long enough to really see invasive fire ants hit their peak, let alone crazy Rasberry ants.  "Stay indoors," many people said.  "Work hard and then use your savings to fly to a better place if you want to go outside." 

For a number of years, I drank that Kool-Aid.  But then as I got older and wiser, I realized that the people who deferred to Howard Hughes's conclusion had neglected to qualify his quote by noting that he had OCD.  I also learned that, unless we're at the absolute peak of a mosquito hatch-out (which only happens a few times a year), it's simply worth going outside.  Here are a few pics of what I'd be missing these days if I didn't at least step out into my own back yard.

Might as well put the most outrageous flower first:  Hibiscus.

The two bell peppers I added to last night's spaghetti sauce.  We call this intense color "radioactive green", except it's fully natural, the color that properly-grown bell peppers are supposed to exhibit (the photo is not color-enhanced). 

Okra blossom. 

Yet another anole. 

I forget the name of this stuff, but it makes a really cool container plant. 

Mint from the herb garden.  Them's good eatin'. 

Bark shedding from a crape myrtle (unmurdered). 

"Lizard porn!" my teenager snorted and guffawed when she saw this photo.  This is why we have so many anoles in our garden.   

Bat-faced cuphea, in abstractia, sort of. 

Sweet potato vine in recent rain. 

Parent and child cuddled up next to a garden hose on a stacked-stone landscaping wall. 

Newly-planted collards with yesterday morning's dew.  Local grocery stores be damned. 

The sky over Centerpointe Drive yesterday evening at 6:35 p.m.  Did you notice it as you were driving home from your high-paying Houston job??  Or at that point were you still thinking that there was nothing wonderful to experience outdoors in greater Houston??

Stacked stone landscaping, Part 1

How can folks who live in areas of unstable soils achieve beautiful stacked stone landscaping that will stand the test of time?

A rare sight: our first stacked stone landscape bed in the greater Houston, Texas suburbs.  I'm hoping that it will stand the test of time, and this post will describe the construction steps that we attempted in order to make it so. 

Let me ask the same question in a relative rather than an absolute fashion.  In greater Houston, we don't have the best track record of making houses that stand the test of time, or roads either, for that matter.  I can't find a reference for this, but I've read that one of the reasons why our freeways are not stacked as they are in Austin and San Antonio has to do with soil instability - the soils can't support stacking structures in many areas (at least not for a price we can afford).  If these things are the case, if with all of our wealth and technology we cannot even stack our freeways around here, what chance do we have with landscape beds?!

The bane of our collective upper Texas coast existence:  interior damage to a home as possible evidence of foundation settling and/or breakage. 

Screengrabbed from Houston realtor Bill Edge's article on how to care for your home's slab foundation. 

Some folks may not be aware of the scope of this challenge, so let me explain just a bit further. 

Here in greater Houston, most areas are underlain by clay-rich soils that shrink and swell with changes in moisture level.  They're constantly on the move to some degree, and this can wreak havoc with all manner of structural improvements.

I'm citing greater Houston because we live here, but unstable soils are also found in many other areas of the country.  This diagram illustrates the principles of foundation reinforcement. 
Screengrabbed from the website of Buildet Foundation Repair of St. Louis Missouri.

This is a small-scale example from a location within the City of Houston.  Do you see how the sidewalk segment attached to the manhole is newer than the rest of the sidewalk (concrete is bright white)?  That's because differential settling lowered all of the surrounding sidewalk, but the manhole shaft acted as a fixed pier which kept that one segment elevated while the rest of the soil sank by several inches.  The City later came back and replaced that segment so that folks would not trip over its raised edges. 

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps Streetview for a location in the Clear Lake area. 

To make a long story short, after quite a lot of research and consultation with a professional landscaper, I decided that I would not attempt to oppose the forces of nature as they manifest on the upper Texas coast.  I decided to make my stacked stone improvements "float" rather than trying to make them rigid.  That way, even if the underlying soils shifted over time, I could simply respond by re-leveling the structures rather than by having to demolish and build all over again. 

You don't have to go far before you see an example of the rigid-structure damage I'm talking about.  Here's a low landscaping wall split because of shifting soils (or so it appears).  The location?  Galveston County Courthouse Annex on Calder Road. 

To show you what I mean, I'm going to detail the build sequence of our first raised planter bed.  I'm actually going to show two different methodologies (Part 1 and Part 2 of this post), with the first being the approach for which we hired local contractor Greenscapes Lawn and Landscaping. 

One of the most important things you have to remember, especially if your house is new, is that the its construction involved a lot of soil disturbance and infill, especially adjacent to your slab.  That's a necessary process associated with grading suburban lots and building slab foundations.  This pic shows our front entrance shortly after the walkway was poured.  You can see that a lot of soil was "missing" from this area, which means it had to be replaced...

 

...and the way they replace it is by bringing in dump trucks of fill, which is often a sandy material.  This then gets bulldozed around the lot for proper grading and leveling.  You'll see this distinctive orange color in some photos that follow. 

 

We got past our mental roadblock on front-yard landscaping on the day when we encountered these particular pallets of stone, which we found at Sunland Nursery, 402 FM 646 between Highway 3 and IH-45 (basically, about a half mile northeast of the huge shopping complex at FM 646 and the freeway).  Sunland doesn't appear to have a website, but it's run by an older gentleman named George. 

I had a "Eureka!" moment because these sandstone segments are much larger than any other chopped stone that I had seen for sale around here - in particular, they are wider.  It occurred to me that maybe it had a better potential to "float" because each one would distribute its considerable weight (20 to 60 pounds per piece) over a larger footprint. 

The moment of financial truth as the stone gets set on the scale.  Stone is most often sold by the pallet around here, and prices have risen steadily in the past couple of years.  Generally you can expect to pay in the range of $0.17 to $0.27 per pound (as of spring 2013), depending on the type of stone.  This will make each pallet come out to around one thousand dollars. 

Yes, you heard correctly - a grand per pallet.  That is the unfortunate reality of living in a geographic area where we have no suitable natural stone for hundreds of miles in every direction.  This stuff got transported in from Oklahoma, so the price reflects the considerable cost of transportation.

The other cost represented in that price is the cost of labor.  George the landscaper told me that, when he requests this cut, his supplier complains bitterly about having to chop the rock into these wider pieces.  It's difficult work. 

Initially, my husband and I were not planning to put this much investment into our foundation beds.  We were instead planning to save the lion's share of the budget for making a nice flagstone courtyard in the center of our lawn.  However, when we saw this specialized stone, we changed our focus because we really liked it. 

 

So, OK, this is what our front bed looked like prior to any work beginning (except I had scraped off and tarp'd the top layer of mulch and pulled out a few central shrubs).  It was just an ordinary on-grade suburban foundation bed edged in the same kind of sandstone, but a much smaller chop.  Nothing terrible about this, but nothing distinctive or special, either. 

As I mentioned in this previous post, this was simply a mulch bed set on grade.  It followed the contours of the lot, which is strongly sloped between these two houses to promote efficient rainwater drainage.  For this reason, the bed had the visual appearance of "sagging" to the left, into the drainage swale. 

Again, nothing terrible about this, but it's very ordinary.  Not much sophistication to the construction or the design.  It began its esthetic life as a bunch of mulch simply tossed on top of the builder's graded suburban lot. 

 

OK, now we're beginning to excavate for the stacked stone foundational support.  Here you see that same orange-colored sandy fill material that the builder had laid down when the house was built. 

 

Somewhere underneath all that soil that had to get disturbed in your yard as your house was being built, there is "native" soil which is undisturbed and for that reason, it's more compacted than the top layers of bulldozed soil and emplaced fill.  In the greater Houston area, that's often identifiable as a relatively stiff clay "gumbo" soil (the stuff that sticks annoyingly to your boots).  In this pic, you can see a hint of it - it's the taupe-gray material visible near photo center. 

If you are able to dig down and set your landscaping improvements upon this native layer, you'll likely have better support.  It's not always practical to do that, depending on the depth of fill. 

 

Support is key.  Here you see the limestone aggregate and crushed granite that underpinned this stacked stone.  That pile in the background is fill excavated from the footprint of the stone foundation. 

 

The limestone gravel is white against the white driveway in the pic above, so it's difficult to see.  Even this basic stuff has to be brought in from the Hill Country, a few hundred miles away.  Houston is underlain by soft coastal sediment deposits with no rock to speak of. 

Corner of the excavation.  The emplaced fill was pretty thick here, given that the lot was built up for drainage. 

Incidentally, if you're doing anything like this, first check your property survey for setbacks and utility easements.  Our original curved mulch bed actually extended into the five-foot setback for this lot line.  That's not such a big deal when there's no structure to an ordinary mulch bed, but with a larger investment like this raised bed, it's important to contain it within setbacks or there could be trouble later on (e.g., when you sell your house, any structures impinging on setbacks will likely be called out as a nonconformance). 

 

After the outline of the bed was excavated, the area was infilled with the limestone and compacted. 

Notice two things here:  first, the footprint actually ended up being wider than the stacked stone will be, particularly in foreground areas where the wall will become thicker due to decreasing grade.  This is important for added stability.  Second, there's a grade step-down visible near the bottom of the photo.  This cut stone is so expensive that you don't want to be underpinning your wall with any more than necessary.  As the grade changes, you can step like this, rather than digging the entire trench to a single level.  If this didn't happen, some of the stone would get buried, at $4.00 to $16.00 per piece! 

Notice the following:  (1) The crushed granite was added on top of the limestone within the generous footprint of the base, the footprint which extends out to either side of the rock which was wide to begin with.  This is all done with the intention of constructing as robust a base as practicable (given cost considerations) to minimize future shifting and settling.  (2) Pink twine was strung to keep the structure on level.  (3) Stone stacking started at the corner, which is a geometric necessity (you can't start anywhere else and have the corner come out properly).  (4) This is a dry-stack methodology.  There is no mortar placed between the stones. 

 Number (4) above is what I meant when I said I decided not to fight nature.  I expect soils in this area to shrink and swell and shift as the years pass, because that's what they do around here.  Instead of trying to oppose this, I decided just to create a robust base, but then if the soils shift in two or five or ten years, I'll simply disassemble this wall, re-level the base, and re-stack. 

 

To say the same thing another way, my principal investment is in the stones themselves.  If I were to mortar them together and then this whole apparatus shifts much like the Courthouse Annex's low brick wall did, I'm going to damage the stones, perhaps irreparably, taking them back apart.  If instead I leave this whole thing float, I'm preserving the bulk of my investment even if it requires future adjustment. 

 

My husband took this line of reasoning even one step further in noting with amusement that, if housing resale prices in Centerpointe soften to the point where we cannot get our stacked stone investment back upon selling this house at some future point, we could simply pay movers to pick up all this stone and take it to our next house, so we could re-stack it there. 

 

Now, on with the final bits of the description. 

 

The actual placement of the stones is an art.  This is natural stone, so it's not all the same thickness or shape.  It's basically a process of iteration to find the optimal configuration. 

 

Using pre-cast cement blocks is much more convenient because they're all identically sized (and also a lot cheaper), but we find it to be nowhere near as beautiful as natural stone.  Stacked stone in greater Houston - the ultimate luxury. 

I'm really happy that we decided to include crushed granite in the base like this (it was our landscaper's idea).  It adds another visual dimension, a meatier look, and it makes for an easier lawn-edging task here.  Crushed granite will become even more important in Part 2 of this post.   

BEFORE and AFTER:  "Builder basic" becomes bodacious.

In summary, the keys to this dry-stacking approach are as follows:

1. The stone is wide enough and heavy enough to bear the weight of the soil in the bed behind it without needing to be physically fixed.  Narrower stone would not work without structural reinforcement. 
2. The wall is low enough so that significant shear stress does not occur.
3. The base is robust enough (hopefully) to minimize the effects of shifting.
4. The stones are overlapped for optimal weight distribution.
5. The stacked stone is plumb and level so that there are no lateral forcings that would exacerbate a shrink-swell-driven tendency for the entire unit to gravity-creep.  Remember what I said three or four times when describing how we built our cinder block cactus garden: whatever it is, build it level.  If you fail to do this, you can expect misery, and sooner rather than later. 

OK, so I know you're wondering:  What the heck did this latest suburban tract home escapade of ours cost?! 

 

Here's what went into the bill from Greenscapes Lawn and Landscape: 

1. One pallet of this very expensive stacked Oklahoma sandstone 
2. About a yard each of crushed granite and crushed limestone
3. Transportation of all materials
4. Labor (one day of work for the landscape supervisor and two apprentices)

For those of you who are regular blog readers:
YES, I tried to find an honest construction contractor who is operating above the law, including where tax payments are concerned.   Note the date on that invoice stub - April 29, 2013.  I signed that contract and paid this bill almost a month before I raised those potentially uncomfortable questions about the source of labor for the building of League City's new Public Safety Building.  I do actually try to put my money where my mouth is - in this case, literally. 

Greenscapes Lawn and Landscape is owned by a young man named Joe Cunningham.  He's from another part of America where construction business doesn't exactly take place like it does in Texas.  He told me that he's paying his taxes and I was inclined to believe him.

 

Could you get a stacked stone bed built around here for less than that amount shown above?  Almost certainly.  Could it be done for much less but still with equivalent construction care by an experienced professional who is actually declaring their income?  Please drop me an email if you find such a contractor. 

 

Anyway, now you know the secret as to why my husband and I are such consummate DIYers: if we limit ourselves to using legitimate contractors, we can't afford to do very much contracting.  Of the massive amount of customization work we've done on our house over the past three years, this was the very first time that we hired someone. 

 

In Part 2 of this post, I'll describe our second stacked stone bed, the supportive base for which my husband and I designed and executed ourselves, and which is different from the method shown above.  Stay tuned.