Landscape For The House

The soft landscape that is the planting of flowers and shrubs around the house is my wife's domain. She will decide everything as to the choice of plants and the arrangement. Since she finds immense joy and satisfaction in doing it, I am only happy to watch. My only involvement is only for the occasional advice whenever she chooses to ask and other menial job which requires more muscular power such as re potting, moving the larger pots around and filling the larger pots with soil.
Of late I became more involved in the landscape work both the soft landscape and the hard landscape. Now I am more interested to produce some potted seedlings for sale to the local nursery. This I will dwell on in more detail in my future posts. For now I would like to share with you all some of the hard landscape projects which I did for the house.
Fatthiyah has been getting ideas for the hard landscape projects from such magazines as Laman or Anjung Seri which she buys regularly and read them from front to back. With quite a stack of sawn timber left over from our house renovation job which I have been reluctant to dispose off lest they become necessary later, Fatthiyah asked me to do something with it so as to reduce the pile from being used as rodent's nest or even worse from being used the breeding place for snakes.
The first project started off with the making of a simple fence using 2" x 2" wood as poles and nailed with 1" x 2" laterals.
To start off I will show you some of the tools I used for the job.


A Black & Decker folding bench, a Makita 7" hand held circular power saw (not really necessary for the first job but was used due to the fasting month where energy conservation is of paramount importance), a Sandvic cross cut saw, a hammer and some nails. The power drill is not in the picture but it was used to drill some holes before nailing the wood together. The wood being old and dry will split without the holes being drilled first.

This is how the wooden decorative fence look like after being given several coats of ICI's solar screen. This solarscreen product will keep the wood from rotting due to the constant exposure to water and sun.
Fatthiyah was so happy with it and pretty soon she came up with another idea albeit much more harder to do due to larger pieces of wood used. For this job I should be using at least 5" x 5" posts which I don't have. What I did was to use 2" x 5" pieces together to form a 4" x 5' blocks. For this job I am thankful that I have the hand held circular saw as it really helped me with the cutting of the larger pieces. The project is for a flower pot stand.

This is how the contraption looked like when completed. A flower pot will be placed on each posts which ranged in height from 12' to 24".

After several coats of solarscreen application, this is how it looks. So as not to waste space I placed some 2" x 2" rafters on the rack which could be used to place more pots.

The next project was my own project. It was a bench to complement the pseudo marble bench and table which I sometime use to work on my notebook whenever I want to be outdoor. Since the benches which came with the set were made of concrete, they were too heavy to move around and the distance was not conducive for working on a notebook when placed on the table.



A closer view of the wooden bench. The bench was later given a white coat of paint to ensure it will last longer and and make it aesthetically pleasing to the eye since it matches the colour of the other furniture.
The last project was another flower pot stand since I still have ample sawn timber left overs. This time it was for a three pot stand.


A flat piece to cover the post and provide a larger surface for the pots.

The rack after painting.


The three pots rack with flower pots placed on it.

With this idea why not do your own? They are really quite simple to do and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to do it. A saw, a hammer, some nails and some sawn timber are all that you need.