A Glimpse At The Overall Plan — More Sidewalks, Window Flower Boxes, A Water Feature, More Steps, And A Removable Ramp

Yesterday, as I was working on the side steps for the studio, I remembered that a few years back, I did a mockup of what I envisioned the finished studio exterior looking like. So I went back into my archives and found it. Here’s what I created back in 2018.

What’s funny is that at the time, this is what our house actually looked like…

In other words, virtually nothing had been done to the exterior of our house other than the new siding and paint color, which was a vast improvement over the original…

…but there was still a long way to go.

Since that mockup I did back in 2018, I completely redid the front porch, building a floating wood porch over the original concrete. I built new wood front steps to match the front porch. We had the old front sidewalk replaced with a new, wider sidewalk. We now have an actual driveway. The windows have actual shutters similar to the ones I did in that mockup (although I still have one fallen shutter that still needs to be rehung). And I’m close to having actual steps on the side studio door in place of the cinder block steps that have been there for years. I may be moving at a snail’s pace, but at least there’s progress!

But for the next month, I’m all about the exterior. And I’ve been dreaming and planning about future projects. I won’t be able to get this done now (or probably this year at all), but one of the biggest and most expensive thing I still want in the front is more sidewalks. I’d like to connect the front sidewalk to the driveway. I did a really bad mockup to see what that would look like…

Our landscape plan has a much more accurate view of how that ties in with the sidewalk and driveway, and you can see that it will continue on the other side of the front sidewalk as well and wrap around the bedroom side of the house (which is labeled “gym” on our landscape plan).

Of course, I’d love for that to be all concrete, but for budget purposes, I want to look at other options as well. I’m wondering what the cost difference would be between a concrete walkway and something like a crushed granite walkway. I think a crushed granite walkway would be very charming while also providing a material that Matt could still use in his power wheelchair, just as long as I can get that walkway even with the sidewalk and driveway where they meet.

I’ve also been looking at water features for the area in front of the breakfast room windows. I’ve dreamed of having a water feature there for years now, but I never could figure out exactly what I wanted. I started out thinking I wanted something out of natural stone, like a little stone waterfall type of feature. And then I considered a tiered fountain. But now that I’ve had several years to think about it, I really want something more structured than a stone waterfall type of feature, but not quite so grand as a tiered fountain. Now I envision something more like this simple bubbler, but I want it to be big. This one is the Girona Water Fountain from Outdoor Fountain Pros, but it only measures 30″ in diameter and 15″ high.

I think I want that style, but I’d like it to be a little wider, but definitely taller. I want it to be seen from the street.

And then, of course, I want to add window boxes to the windows. I love the charm of window boxes, and as you can see from the studio mockup I did several years ago, adding window boxes was always the plan. I have to laugh at the fact that I’ve wanted window boxes on our house for so long now, and yet, my workshop was the first to actually get window boxes.

But because I like continuity, I want to build those exact window boxes for our house as well, starting with the studio window. I copied and pasted those workshop window boxes onto this picture so I could see how it looks. And yep. I still want them.

Anyway, that’s just a little bit of fun dreaming about future projects, but for now, my only focus is to get the studio side steps finished. And then, for the rest of this next month of outdoor projects, I want to get the skirting on the front porch finished. After that, if there’s enough time, I’d really like to get the steps to the new bedroom door finished as well. Now that I have a plan and have worked out all of the bugs in the building process with the studio steps, I can confidently build those bedrooms steps.

And to answer the question I get asked the most often, the steps to the bedroom will NOT have a permanent ramp incorporated into them. The plan is to have a large landing as the top step right outside the bedroom door that I can wheel Matt onto in case of emergency, and then I’ll have a movable ramp stored just around the corner that I can pull out and put on the steps to get him down into the yard. I’ve been looking at lightweight aluminum ramps, and I found one that weighs 26 pounds. I think that will work perfectly for our purposes. We don’t have enough room by that door for a porch, so the purpose was never to build something where we’d spend time sitting and enjoying the outdoors. We already have a front porch for that. The only purpose of that door is to have a point of egress in case of an emergency. As long as I can get him outside to that large, top landing, and then have a ramp in place within a couple of minutes to get him to the front yard, I feel good about that. But I don’t think he needs a permanent ramp on every door in the house.

I do plan to build a ramp out of the back door (i.e., the master bathroom door) to the back yard, though. So that will give us options. I’ll have two directions that I can take him in case of emergency. But that ramp won’t be something I’ll spend a lot of time on. I mean, it will be safe, but it probably won’t look pretty. I’m still holding onto hope that we can build our addition one day, and in that case, I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a permanent ramp that will just have to be torn down in the future. But rest assured, Matt’s safety is always my number one priority.

So with all of that said, I’m excited to spend the next month (until my birthday) working outside. These outdoor projects are a great diversion for me, and it’s almost like a birthday present I’m giving to myself. 😀 If I can get the studio side steps and the front porch finished, that will be good enough for me. But it will be an added bonus if there’s any way I can also fit in the bedroom steps during that time as well. We’ll see!