Glutter

Home Creationism

Our property straddles two different lots, which means our house is on one side while the extra land is on the other. Since it was meant to be two plots of land there was never anything created to facilitate getting from one side to the other. The only way was to walk outside, up a hill and into a gate on another road, which of course was stuck because of the over grown ivy.

So to get to the top of the hill where my citrus tree and cactus garden are, I have to use a chair to climb up a wall and walk on some loose soil to get to it. It was all overgrown of course as well as no one ever went up there -a few months ago I attacked the ivy and agave one afternoon and created a little "path" that I could walk on - so as we started to do more with the garden it seemed only sensible to build a proper path up.

At first i thought the whole operation was a necessary pain and had to be lived with. After the first few days I was really pleased with the crop of rocks we found, decided to preserve and began to see it as a piece of art.

However, when it wasn't finished when I thought it would, I started to feel it was the the work of a crazy man, passive aggressively trying to destroy our nice little sitting area to cause me personal psychic pain. After another weekend I started calling it the "Great Wall" likening it to the great wall of China, as it is debatable if it was a useful endeavor or not.

Finally this weekend the retaining wall is starting to look like one, and I can see that we needed it to hold up the hill so the soil doesn't continuously slide down onto the path we're going to make and I had a break through: people build walls all the time, in fact every house, garden and fence around here was built by someone, either for themselves or a contractor. In fact giant sky scrappers are being built all the time and not to mention giant reservoirs, damns and bridges are being built in China, one brick at a time mostly by hand and not with massive equipment that you find in the US and HK. So in the context of great architectural projects in this world, our wall seems just rather small and easy to make. So I am more than okay with what's going on in the house. yay!

it's still going to be a week or two of probably six before it's all finished. I thought I would share the work in progress...



As you can see in there is nothing just a little gate and a hill.



Here Pieter is attacking the ground and wall to build the first landing. So there is something to build steps up on



We then found a crop of rocks we wanted to preserve, so he poured the concrete around it.



Here is the pretty wall we made around the rocks, including our little alcove and sticks to evoke the South Western Adobe Style of the original settlers.



This is the retaining wall and path.



You can see here that now there is a landing to build some steps up to and I can walk and take things up and down the hill.

Yes, it all looks insane, but it will be very beautiful in the end.... (I hope!)