In the beginning

When we moved into our home our backyard was a big open gravel driveway shared with the neighbour on the right whose tenants regularly parked under our living room window. So we built a fence and put in some raised beds, some plants, a wading pool for the kids and went on with their young lives. Later we added some flagstone for cars that might occasionally want to park in the back and a small shed from Home Depot for storing some tools and flower pots. I managed to hang a big hammock or two from our balcony railing and the yard became for lounging.

But now as our kids outgrow everything, including our house, we all find ourselves competing for desks and tables. As two artists who work at home, either taking photos, writing music, making things, setting up drum sets, recording studios, we agreed. We should make a bigger shed and create a backyard studio.

Several other studios have inspired us. Both our mothers turned garages into their art spaces, a music room for his mom, a visual art studio for mine so with these role models, we have decided to proceed. My brother converted his shed into a music studio. So it kind of runs in the family.

Our neighbours have told us they'd like to build a fence but our crumbling cement block fence was concerning them. What if our fence just tumbled onto theirs one fine winter day in the snow? It's probably unlikely but after moving the clematis and Virgina creepers aside, it did seem they had a point. This fence really was cracking up and tilting.

Tell them you'll repair it, I said, hopefully. So Michel went out one fine summer day and decided to repair it. About an hour later it was clear he was going to have to demolish it.

A similar wall took 3 days, a bull dozer and a few large bins to remove next door to us so we decided to be more ecological about the whole thing and to reuse the old blocks as a layer under the shed to be. Our backyard has a poured concrete foundation under a later of bricks and soil so clearing all of this to get to the shifting slate of this neighbourhood underneath doesn't seem worth it.

The irony in all this is that the wall was helping to keep water from our eavestrough down spout on our side of the yard. A big torrential downpour soon showed that our neighbours on the left were now being flooded by water from our roof. So their fence guy proposes a solution ... he's going to make a small wall of concrete blocks along the dividing line, essentially rebuilding a small portion of our old fence. Well, whatever, we don't want to flood anyone and we'll run our down spout to the alleyway anyway. None of this is the glamorous part, that's for sure.