Author: Mr. Homegrown

Our New Open Floor Plan

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Design
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Framing the new/old closet.

Here at Root Simple we specialize in backpedalling, flip-flopping and outright hypocrisy. Within a few months of some big critique or pronouncement you can guarantee that I’ll be doing the very thing I railed against. Flipper fences? First I dismissed them then I built one. Double digging? We wrote about it in our first book then disowned the practice. No doubt, within a fortnight I’ll be back on Facebook and Instagram posting my avocado toast lunches.

How about open floor plans? In the click-baitiest blog post ever, I declared them a “death trap.” Then the good natured Will Wallus of the Weekend Homestead came on the podcast to gently defend open floor plans. Naturally, I’m spending this month making our house, gasp, more open. Let me explain.

When I installed the floor in the living room in the aughts I discovered an opening that used to exist between our living room and what we use as our bedroom. Back in 1920 this house was a one bedroom with a kind of sitting room open to the living room. I’ve also long know that the closet used to have a window in it that was covered up when a previous owner split it in two.

Here’s the existing floor plan, which was probably configured this way sometime in the 1960s:

And here’s what it will look like when put back to its original configuration as a one bedroom house:

Note the more open floor plan with the room on the left opening into the living room:

Rather than try to do all the work myself I’ve decided to do only the carpentry. I’m going to leave the drywalling, painting and electrical work to professionals.

Having tricked out the garage into a full woodshop, I can now mill my own lumber to the exact dimensions used in 1920. Over the weekend I replicated the window frame in the closet that was damaged when they covered it up. Now I’ve got to scavenge up a window.

When we’re done the house will be back, almost, to the way it was when constructed in 1920. When we first moved in back in 1998 we had to do a lot of expensive foundation work and basic repairs. This year we’ve set out to do a final restoration push. Call me reactionary, but I’ve discovered with this house that things work better when restored to their original materials and configuration. And sometimes that means opening up a wall!

Should you need remodeling/resotoration advice, I highly recommend the Fine Homebuilding website. 

Saturday Tweets: Lyme Disease, Unuselessness and a Plum Mystery

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Saturday Linkages
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How to Make a Hexagonal Raised Bed

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Design, Gardening
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Bloggers such as myself sometimes have the tendency to put up a post with the promise of “detailed instructions to follow” and then, lacking the oversight of an editor, somehow never get around to delivering the goods. Over the weekend I got a request for detailed instructions on how to build the hexagonal raised beds we posted about back in 2014. So here you go.

Materials
You will need six 6-foot pieces of 2×6 lumber. I would suggest pressure treated lumber. I chose the dimensions for these beds to make them as big as they could be and still be able to comfortably reach into the middle of the bed. These dimensions will also minimize waste (since we’ll be using 6′ lumber).

Tools
This project requires a compound miter saw, a tool on my list of recommended homestead accessories. Mine has gotten a lot of use over the years for everything from gardening projects to building furniture.

The angle at the corners of a hexagon are 60º. Therefore, you will need to set your saw to 30º (90º-60º=30º).

With the saw set, you just need to cut 12 sections, each 2’6″ long, with that 30º angle at each end. Secure the pieces together with screws at the corners.

Although I did not do this I would recommend reinforcing the bed by screwing a 2×4 in the center as above.

If you have a table saw (which I did not have when I built my beds) you could reinforce the corners with another 2×4 ripped at an angle. My beds did fine without this step. You could also make these beds taller if you need to by adding more courses of lumber. And if you’re the welding type, these beds would be very handsome (though expensive) if done in metal.

Pros and Cons
While I was pleased with aesthetics of my hexagonal beds they no longer grace our backyard. The area in which they resided became too shady to grow vegetables in and also became the strip mine that supplied the clay for our adobe oven. Our landscaper has proposed making this part of our yard a rain garden. More on that project later in the year.

One disadvantage of beds with this odd shape is that they are harder to critter-proof. I don’t consider this a deal killer, but it’s something to think about if you have the hoards of marauding mammals that nightly assault our backyard even in this very urban part of Los Angeles. You can see in the first picture that I ended up creating a sort of bamboo teepee to provide support for beans and tomatoes and on which to attach bird netting (which the marauding mammals easily breeched).

I’ve posted about the pros and cons of raised beds in the past. Unless you have a compelling reason to build raised beds I think it’s always better to grow in the ground. That said, these hexagonal beds look really nice and I would make them again if I lived somewhere with less mammalian interference.