We may not have our mosquito-free sanctuary until the end of mosquito season, but at least pretty soon we will have railings.  We now have a roof over the second story deck and all of the second story deck boards got anchored today.  We hope that this means that our dining room will finally stop leaking every time it rains.  Of course, now we have a new project — repairing all of the water-damaged plaster around the window.  I also fear that our newfound watertightness will mean that there will be no more rain in DC this summer.   I hope that’s not the case.

During the hiatus, Frank filled our gabion walls with some of concrete mountain.  The process went more quickly than we had expected and the result is great!  He has been on the lookout for any free bricks on Freecycle for the past year, and he actually scored several carloads on two separate occasions.  So, the outside of the gabion walls will be brick and the inside is where all the concrete is, as you can sort of see in this picture.

The portion that is submerged underground is completely concrete chunks (9 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet). This photo, from 6/24/09, is of the pit with the empty baskets and Frank dropping the ceremonial first chunk of concrete to start the wall.  It’s a little hard to tell how deep the hole is, but Frank can vouch that it’s 3 feet — he lifted every bit of dirt, clay, and rock out of the pit himself!

We will duplicate this process with the garage wall, thereby hopefully getting rid of most of the concrete that we took out of the backyard as well as the remainder of concrete mountain.  The timing of that will depend on when Frank finds a new job and actually has to be somewhere else during the day.

Mike is very happy to have Frank’s full-time help on the deck.  Frank has been charged with cutting the boards that will be the railings — a long and tedious but instantly gratifying task.  We chose to use a semi-environmentally friendly form of pressure treated wood for the deck boards and the support structures.  This was because we couldn’t get FSC-certified cedar and because we could get FSC-certified pressure treated that also has no arsenic.  However, Mike had a contact that had some Spanish cedar sitting in his garage that he didn’t need.  So we bought his Spanish cedar and Frank is making it custom sized for our railings.  It smells wonderful and looks great!  Once the rest of the deck is stained, we expect that the difference between the two woods won’t be so obvious.

Stay tuned for the Schipegan version of the New Yankee Workshop, starring “Norm” Schipegan.

• 2007 – we purchased the house from the estate of Henrieta Walker.
• 1961 – the house was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Walker.
• 1959 – 1961 – two different owners occupy the house for about one year each.
• 1911 – 1959 – the house is occupied by its original owner, Garner Whiteman, who was a Chemist working for the Department of Agriculture.
• 1911 – The house was built by the developer Harry Wardman as part of a large group of row homes built between 1910 and 1914, and bounded by Spring, 14th, Monroe and Holmead Streets.
• c 1800 – 1910 – The area was a farm, eventually sold by Mr. Holmead to Harry Wardman.

But what about all the time before that?  Forests, Native Americans, Dinosaurs?  I have been thinking about this because I  just finished digging a pit in our back yard nine feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep.  I wondered how long all of that dirt had been there as I cursed the rocks in my path.  There were very clear layers of sediment that I was passing through and we figured they must have been at least thousands of years old.  Here’s a little of what I’ve learned of the history of our back yard.

First, though, an important point about our location, just east of Rock Creek Park.  All the rock in Rock Creek Park is the remains of a giant mountain range.  What is now the Appalacian Mountains was once as big as the Alps, but over millions of years it has eroded to what is there now.  At the eastern edge of this range sits Rock Creek, and the high ridge that the creek follows is the remnaints of the eastern edge of that mountain range.  This is important to our back yard because this mountain range was a natural barrier to the ocean which, at many time in the past, covered our back yard.

In periods where the Earth was cool, water was locked up in glaciers, ocean levels were lower, and our backyard was above sea level.  When the Earth warmed and the oceans rose, we were under water again, and a new layer of sediment was deposited on our backyard.  Every cycle of cool and warm created another layer of gunk for me to dig down into.

• 237 million years ago (mya) – It was a long drive to the beach for us, because we would have had to drive across North Africa to get to the ocean, about where Lybia is now.  Along the way our car may have been stepped on by Traissic period beasts, such as the Placerias.
• 200 mya – 14,000 years ago – North America broke off from Pangea and our backyard drifted northward from near the equator to its present location.  Now that Africa was not there to protect us from rising oceans, our backyard was continually flooded and dried out again, leaving deposits of silt, clay, and microscopic sea creatures.  Rocks from the mountains that are now Rock Creek Park were tumbled along the coast line, made smooth, and dropped in layers to get in my way millions of years later.
• 14,000 – 10,000 years ago - Humans made their first visit to our backyard some time during this period, coming from Asia across the Bering land bridge and quickly spreading throughout N and S America.  - did they hold our first barbeque?  I hope they had vegiburgers.
• 10,000 years ago – c 1650 – I don’t know much about what the Native Americans did in our backyard, if anything.  There were a lot of mosquitoes, even then.  Our backyard sits on fairly high ground overlooking the swamp that is now our nations’s capitol.
• c 1650 – c 1800 – ??? I need to do some more research, I guess.

Our backyard is part of what geologists refer to as the Atlantic Coastal Plane, which extends from NYC down to the Yukatan Pennisula, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Appalacians, or in our case, to that high ridge line just west of Rock Creek.  In some places the sediment deposits are 13,000 feet deep, and I only had to dig three feet.  So I don’t know exactly how old that layer of gray crud is at the bottom of my pit, but each layer I could see correspods to one ice age.  Ice ages come along evey 15,000 years or so, and I saw many, many layers.

Mike laid out the deck boards on Monday so they could dry out and Frank had hoped to get them all stained this week before they were installed.  But, of course, it rained all week.  So, they’ll be stained later.  In the meantime, we can have our meals outside in the back now, with a beautiful view of concrete mountain.  This week the second story should take shape and we may even get some railings!

The back deck is coming along really well, despite the rain issues.  At the end of last weekend, the entire first floor was framed out.  We didn’t lay the deck boards because we ended up having to go with pressure treated wood and the recommendation was that we let the boards dry out first (ha ha) so we’d be able to avoid using twisted ones.  So, the frame is all bolted together and the deck boards are trying to dry out in our garage.  We will need to stain all of the framing and the deck boards before they go on, but of course this will require a dry day…

You can see a full set of progress photos here.  A couple of highlights are below.

Digging the 5′ deep trenches for retaining walls.

The first floor is all framed out.

At the end of the day on May 31st.