I'm always happy to be able to pull off a project from beginning to end with my own ideas and hands, but there are times (a lot of them actually) when I could use some help. A few years ago, a friend mentioned he had a few telephone towers he wanted to get rid of. He'd rescued them from somewhere hoping to make something out of them some day and never got around to it. I happened to have a wisteria (we'd transplanted from our last house) that I never got around to making a support for. So....here's what happened. This is a pic of my wisteria from a couple days ago (I didn't expect it to bloom for a couple of years after she got pruned down by half). Apparently she wanted to show off her new pad. I stewed on how best to use those old phone towers and this seemed to be the best configuration for an arbor. We didn't pour the pad underneath till a couple springs ago. My handy Husband constructed this arbor, Welding and concrete is more of his thing, so he gets credit for this. I basically only helped with prep and painting (and design). The mesh on the sides is also welded onto it (it's a heavy gauge concrete mesh). It was a beast to get everything lined up right, (especially the footings), but it still turned out pretty well. Now, if we ever want to make an arbor out of phone towers again, it should go a lot easier, lol (Too bad we'll never do this again. That's the way it is though, by the time you figure out how to do something really well in DIY, you might never have to do it again) I've read about wisteria pulling up porches and reeking all sorts of structural havoc, but that won't happen here. It's a good thing I don't get to hang around a scrap yard. I tend to see junk as raw material, I can imagine myself collecting a scrap hoard in the yard. Anyways, here's another one of my projects (or at least sort of mine).
