Patio, Deck, Terrace … Multi-tiered fun!

One of the chief goals of the Happy Boolo Project was to express all three of our pillars — Community, Functionality, and Sustainability — with an outdoor space that brings people together, is easily accessed from the house, and allows us to produce a yield of diverse foods.

Over the last eight years, our patio’s use for entertaining had slowly given way to the need for more growing space.

When we saw our architect’s solution — adding a rooftop terrace over our garage and a deck off the back of the house — we were sold!

Essentially, we are building a multi-tiered structure that supports Community, Functionality, and Sustainability all at the same time.

The Patio

At the time of this writing, we’ve decided to use this winter to fully develop the patio’s design for seating, shade, food production, and food preparation—building a house with pandemic-caused delays is complex enough!

But here are the main ideas:

Using brick salvaged from our original north walkway to either expand the patio’s current curved geometry or transform it into a rectilinear design.
Building a low seating wall using salvaged stone with integrated planter “gateways” to the landscape that contain special soil conditions for special plants (e.g. highly acidic soil for growing blueberries).
Covering the entire patio with a pergola (there is also now a large compressor for our HVAC system next to the stairwell leading from the deck to the patio that cannot be covered).
Designing the pergola’s support columns with planters that allow us to grow vining plants up each column and over the pergola, which would allow fruits, such as hearty kiwi (smooth-skinned) to hang down for easy picking while the foliage provides shade.
Building a masonry oven for baking bread/pizza.

The Deck

The deck serves the main purpose of allowing us to have easy access to our landscape from the house via our two office sliding glass doors, while at the same time, access to both the garage terrace above and the patio below.

(I covered the initial framing of the deck in an earlier post, in case you want to go back and revisit!)

We chose Trex decking and Azek railings.

The deck will eventually have a table for four with an umbrella for shade. We plan to install a tall rectangular planter outside Amy’s office with a trellis that allows tomatoes or cucumbers to grow vertically, which will provide a privacy screen while she sits outside and works. We’ll have various container plants growing on the deck as well to take advantage of morning sun (east), nice noontime sun (south), and passive shade from the house (west) — not a bad place for a small container of lettuce!

In a later post, we’ll reveal the design for our water harvesting system under the deck!

The Garage Terrace

The garage terrace is one of our favorite parts of the project because it gives us an overview of the landscape and a view down Drury as well as down our driveway — I’ve already imagined playing live music up here for when we host Happy Hour (in coming post-pandemic times!) and animatronic Halloween displays where much of the back-end technology is concealed from view. Once completed, it will be a great place to have a drink and a bite, whether that’s just the two of us on a lazy summer evening, a dinner with family, or a tasting menu extravaganza with friends amid the very fruits and vegetables they’re sampling!

The terrace’s design is awesome. The floor is a sloping waterproof membrane that allows rain and melting snow to drain southward into two scuppers located in the southeast and southwest corners. The membrane will be covered by a platform of 2’x2’ Bison tiles made from Forest Stewardship Council-certified tropical wood, which sit just a few inches above the membrane (thanks to a series of conical pedestals) at the house and gradually increases to 8” above the membrane at the south railing. This allows water to flow beneath the tiles with plenty of expansion for freezing/thawing snow/ice or summer downpours.

Below Ricardo from Custom Roofing shares his perspectives during his work installing the impermeable membrane on the garage terrace.

A 3’-high railing will surround the terrace on three sides — the west and south will be wooden while the east will be glass, providing views of the landscape.

The garage terrace will also capture rainwater (to be explained in detail in a later post) by re-directing water into a pipe through the floor into the garage and then out under the stairwell to under the deck. We will also be capturing water collected by the two scuppers into rectilinear vessels (e.g. Rainwater HOG) and then using a solar pump to pump the water back up onto the terrace into a storage vessel for use on plants growing in containers on the terrace’s raised Bison tile platform.

Depending upon how warm it stays during the winter up here, we may or may not employ a cold frame in front of the bathroom window, which would allow us to open the window and check on plants growing during the winter.

We plan to grow a number of fruits and vegetables that benefit from warmer/hotter conditions —again, it’s a great microclimate up here — so we will avoid planting lettuce, arugula, or any other tender veggie that may bolt. But a fig or a dwarf nectarine in a pot might love it up here!

Architect/GC, carpenters, and insulator/trim contractors discussing the details

More on the rainwater and overall landscape plans soon!

Patio, Deck, Terrace … Multi-tiered fun!

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