Modern Lattice Finished (and a tutorial)

Source: cocokelley.blogspot.com via Nikki on Pinterest


So here are my steps to take this:
First up, buy a bunch of furring strips. They are the really cheap boards that are rough and not so pretty. You'll have to dig through them to find ones that are straight and don't have big gouges taken out here and there, but the good news is that at Home Depot I got 1x2x8 furring strips for $.80 each. They also have a few different widths to choose from if you would like a chunkier look. Anyway our garage is about 18' wide and 56" tall, so I ended up needing 48 boards. That's a lot of wood, but at $.80 a pop that's easily less that $50. Since the boards are pretty rough you'll want to give them a little sanding treatment. I used 60 grit sand paper to make quick work of it. I wasn't looking for perfection, just a surface that would be easier to paint. The sanding probably took the longest. Matt helped me our for quite a while this weekend with that. He would sand about 6 boards by the time I was ready to start painting a new bunch of boards. I painted 2 coats on each side, and rotated them after a few minutes of drying time to speed things up. There is nothing as thrilling as watching paint dry.


I am sure you don't need me to hold you hand while painting boards, and probably don't really want to read much more about it so I'll move on. You'll need something to attach your boards to. So I measured the height of my garage wall and planned how the boards would be laid out. I decided to do 6 vertical boards spaced out 4' with the boards being centered on the 4' mark. I also wanted them spaced out from the garage so that some kind of climbing plant could weave in and out of the boards. So, once you have 6 vertical boards cut to size, cut 12 scrap pieces of the same wood about 2" tall. Then pre-drill and pre-screw them together close to the top and bottom of your longer board. If you can, plan out where the horizontal boards will end up so that you can still have access to these screws in case you want to take it off later without deconstructing the whole thing.









Now comes the easy part, well as long as you have some sort of nail gun. Starting at the bottom, nail one end of your horizontal boards to your vertical support, then use a level to make sure it is level before you nail the other end to the corresponding vertical board. (I didn't photograph that, you'll just have to take my word for it.) Once you have the bottom row established everything else is easy peasy. Using at least 2 but preferably 3 scrap pieces of wood, stack those scraps on top of the bottom board at each vertical board and then stack a full sized board on top of those before attaching to the vertical supports.

It also helps keep your seams even if you use that same scrap on the end to line everything up like so. But make sure it rests on 2 boards that are already attached.

Once you have it set then just fire a few nails in to hold everything in place.


Now do that over and over again about 50 million times. Don't worry, it goes by pretty quick. Even quicker if you have a helper to hold the other end of the board for you. Here are a few progress shots which also might indicate how many boards I bought at a time.



And a little update on my moon flowers! They are starting to send out climbers.


Speaking of the red brick things, they have become very important lately whist helping us figure out our next step in the back yard makeover. Can you guess what it might be?





If you guessed drainage you guessed right, if not, you can play again next time. As you can see we have gotten some rain recently. And if you're familiar with Denver or Colorado then you realize that this is some crazy rain. We have had these crazy thunderstorms with torrential rain every night for at least a week now. The ground can't really take any more water and all our plants are drowning. So far we are thinking of putting a french drain under the grass area and directing the water out under the fence next to the gate. That is what most of our other neighbors have going on. I think it's a pretty common problem with the house and garage sandwiching the yard and all. I may have to find a picture to better explain it to Matt, every time I try to explain it he doesn't get what I'm saying. I guess I'm not good at explaining things like that. True story, I even tried to compare it to sushi one time, who does that? Now I just tell him "It's that thing when you tie a string to a midget in a wind breaker and run through a field." He then corrects me by saying "no that's a human kite."

If that last conversation confused you take a minute to enjoy this clip of our favorite Weekend Update correspondent Stefon!





Nikki





I am sharing this post on The CSI Project's Porches, Terraces, and Patios Challenge.