Howdy all!
I'm clearing out the drafts that we have saved up, so some of these projects are a bit old.... sorry, life has been a bit busy.
We have a lovely gravel seating area at our house, but it just gets too hot in the summer! We had a large umbrella (see the photo below), which just didn't cut it. We decided to build a pergola, a more permanent structure that would also serve as a growing trellis for our grapes. First off we dug four holes for the foundations:
The foundation blocks were prefabbed from home depot. We placed them ontop of about a half inch of gravel, and then reburied them. To block out weeds, we have a tarp under the gravel of the seating area. Here you can see the hole in the tarp for the corner posts which are attached to the foundations.
Here you can see the buried foundation blocks (covered with the black planting containers with keep the dog from running into them).
We used redwood for the pergola, which is resistant to decay. You can see here our 4 x4 corner posts, which are then sandwiched by 2x6s. We used two 5/8" bolts to attach them once everything was level.
Since the seating area isn't perfectly flat, we place a 2x4 between the two sets of 2x6 cross beams, and dropped the nearest beam until the 2x4 was level. We then leveled the nearest 2x6 beam and drilled the holes for the 5/8" bolts.
Here is a view of our supervisor, inspecting our progress:
Eventually Flint decided to hide under our grapes, to get out of the sun.
After the posts, and 2x6 cross beams were installed we placed seven 2x4s between the two structures to hold everything together.
Under the structure, N placed a shade cloth to keep us cool until our grapes grow in.
A final photo of the project, after N trained the grapes
Happy gardening!
M&N&G&B
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