A Bit Of Privacy

I wrote earlier about installing our front fence and that we had one for the back sitting in the garage waiting to be installed. Well, it's finally done!

Like the front fence, we used a WamBam product. Only this time we went with a 6ft, semi-privacy, white vinyl fence. We decided to go this route to give us a bit of privacy in our back yard, to block the view to our yard from the street and near by condo building a bit more. But we didn't want to completely close off the yard, which is why we decided on semi-privacy rather than a solid fence. The panels have small gaps between each slat, allowing light (and wind) through, but are still small enough to give the sense of enclosure and privacy. 

Once again it took a full day and six people to get the fence installed. Our handy, dandy contractors found a drill bit that would allow us to drill into the soil (and through all of the crazy roots in the yard) which made installation a whole lot simpler. 

The fence was installed pretty much the same way as the front fence. Anchors into the ground, post covers, and panels. Once the anchors were in, the installation was pretty simple. And I'd assume that installing the anchors might be easier if the soil was a little less disagreeable than ours is. Hence the use of a 3ft drill bit.

Somehow, the addition of a privacy fence actually makes our yard feel bigger (at least to us). And it checks another box off the backyard to do list. But with it being fall, and winter approaching (hopefully not too quickly), the rest of the projects will probably have to wait until spring.

The Wall

Since living in our apartment, I have had numerous comments about "the wall". Well everyone is in luck! We're decided to do something similar in our bedroom in the new house and I'm going to dedicate this post to showing everyone how it was done!

Reminder, the wall in our apartment:

Yes I did paint around bookshelves, hence the giant white space

Start by painting the walls the color you want the lines between the blocks to be. In the case of our apartment we wanted white so we skipped this step. In our bedroom we went with a tealish-blue color (it's almost Tiffany blue for the ladies to get a better idea since pictures and computer screens sometimes distort colors).

Next is to tape off the pattern. This is where you let your creativity shine (or where you call in your artsy mother to help because being an engineer you don't do random super well). Start putting tape up in squares and rectangles of all different sizes. We tried to avoid having a line that connected more than three boxes. This helped to keep the look less predictable. For the apartment I started by taping horizontal and vertical lines using a lot of measuring and a hand level (to make kind of a plaid) and then removed and added tape to make it random. In our bedroom I invested in a laser level that showed both vertical and horizontal level and skipped the plaid step. The entire bedroom took far less time to do than the single wall in our apartment, so I would highly advise the laser level.

Final step is to paint! Just like stripes, don't use too much paint on your brush and start with the brush on the tape and pull onto the wall rather than the opposite way. This will help prevent bleeding under the tape. If you are going with more than one color, I suggest opening all the colors and use your finger dipped in the paint to mark which block will be which color before painting the entire wall. This will help avoid the inevitable multiple blocks of the same color next to each other.

Then just pull the tape off the wall and touch up any bleeding there may be!