You may have seen the different version or phases of us constructing this project and wondering why have we not finalized the deal yet. It’s by design. See, we recycled woods that we took from an old deck we already replaced as well as from a play house that was in the middle of the backyard that we demolished and now replaced it with this much bigger but still a tiny house.
Work on the house itself is now complete. We are now in the final phase which is laying the plumbing system for backyard sinks and also for the kiddos sprinkler for their playground and sandbox. After the plumbing, we’ll do the landscaping, add the water catchment system as well as add more storage spaces around the back and sides.
The water catchment system will consist of 5 or so 55-gal plastic barrels, a water pump, and the plumbing unit to bring water to the the sprinklers in the front of our house as well as the ones in the backyard. We will not use the city water for irrigation purposes. We believe that the grass and plants will love this because the water will not contain chlorine and other chemicals they add into the city water.
Do it the Islanders' way. Simple and Enjoyable.
We are glad to finally get this part of our backyard plan to where it is today. We can surely see the light at the end of the tunnel. We cannot wait to show you what our WATER CATCHMENT is gonna look like. It will give us a feel of living off the grid. lol.
There’s no easy way to run the electricity from the main house to the study house so we had to cut through the sidewalk. We used a 60 amp breaker and 6 gauge wire feeders between the main and subpanels. We used a white for neutral, red and black for hots, and a green wire for grounding. We didn’t know if the sidewalk was repairable until we tried it.
Well, before we can do anything with the landscaping phase, we must fix what we broke in the process. I had never done anything with concrete before beside breaking slabs and stuff. I thought I had to hire someone to come and redo my entire sidewalk.
The STAY HOME, STAY HEALTHY initiative or ORDER if your prefered helped me into thinking I try to fix the sidewalk myself. The end result cannot be better. It sure exceeded my own expectations. I surprised myself a little bit here. I guess it’s because I had never done anything like it before.
It’s safe to say 80 or so percent of the materials used on this 200 square feet study house are recycled from our old deck that came with the house when we bought it. It took us almost 3 years to get to where we are today because of time, money and priority. Gotta thank the man above for giving us the opportunity to do all the work outside of the main house first.
With all these projects under our belts, we now feel a lot more confident in ourselves to tackle what we feel we needed to do on the main house. There are so many advantages of starting on the outside of your main house before doing anything with the main house.
My wife bugged me so many times on why I wasted so much time on these projects when I could have spent them on remodeling our bathroom or kitchen. I never said it out loud, but I was not that confident in my ability to do those kind of projects. I would rather start on something that won’t affect the main house until I build up the confidence and knowledge which I can honestly say I have them today.
Another aspect is that you have no idea what are the weaknesses of your main house is until you have lived in it for a while. You must allow yourself sometimes to know your house first. Just because you think a bathroom remodel is what you need doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to start on. How about you started on the bathroom only to find out the kitchen needed immediate attention?
Start on projects outside of the house first! Decks, Sheds, Windows, Doors, Driveways, Garages, etc… before anything inside the house.
