Planning for next spring

For a bigger copy, click on the above document.

I’m home sick with a cold today, which gave me an opportunity to actually set down on paper all the plans that have been going on in my head these past months. As evidenced in the last post, half the plan is already in action. The west side of my garden has been laid out with raised beds, a sitting area and yards of mulch. The east side of the garden is in the planning stages for next spring.

At present we have a broken down single-car garage – vintage 1945 and never updated. The roof is sagging badly, some of the boards are rotten – but the foundation is solid and a lot of the material can be shored up and used even so. Tearing it down is not an option (getting a permit to build a new structure could take as long as a year), but building onto the original walls and repairing the roof can go ahead without city inspectors. At present, the garage is really rather low to the ground and we’ve discovered that you can build these backyard structures as high as 14 feet (18 feet if it’s going to be laneway housing, which it’s not in our case).

So the plan is to put an extra several feet on the walls to peak the roof at 14 feet with a very lightly sloped roof grade in order to take advantage of all the height we can in order to build a combination backyard studio/loft and garden shed. I’m having a hard time describing it in words here, but essentially our 10*20 foot garage will be divided into two rooms – a studio of 10 * 13 and a shed of 10 * 7. The inner wall of the shed portion (represented by the dotted line above) will come up to only 7.5 feet and atop of that will be a loft that looks down onto the studio. The studio itself will look out onto the patio through french doors and will be used as a combination guest cottage, outdoor swing space, sauna and library. At least half the studio roof will be a green roof with shallow rooting plants and strawberries growing over the edges.

We’re also thinking that eventually the rounded bed by the side of the studio might be turned into a small greenhouse which would feed heat into the structure via the window and also provide for a beautiful view. All very exciting! I wish I could computer-generate a picture of my mind’s eye rather than just the skimpy drawing above, but alas! I am no artist and don’t know how to use those cad programs to do such things.

It’s no small project to develop this yard to its fullest – but I’m hoping the money will materialize through the sale of my half-duplex on the Sunshine Coast – a financial burden that I’m hoping to turn around this fall for a small profit. If that happens then we will be in good shape by the spring to start work on this *very* exciting project: East Vancouver’s very own private spa for all the activists and artists I know 🙂