Building A Wedding Arbor

THE WASHINGTON COUNTRYSIDE My sister-in-law is getting married later this summer and she requested a homemade arbor for the outdoor ceremony. So Garrett and I packed up the baby and the tools and headed east to gramma's farm for a Fourth of July wedding-work-weekend.

Garrett and I have never built a stand-alone arbor before and it was definitely one of those collaborative, design-as-the-go type projects. Garrett would hold up one weathered 4x4 and Auntie Dayne and I would stand back and him-and-haw "three inches to the left", "one-sixteenth-inch down", "flip it around" before giving our stamp of approval. Garrett managed to survive the weekend with his patience intact and we all had a blast. It was a really fun process that got the whole family involved.

We moved the arbor in the back garden for safe keeping and pulled the top members off to weather some more in the sun. We trained some hop vines up the side of the arbor which will hopefully look beautiful come the end of August. To temporarily shore the arbor up (it's a little wobbly without all the top members), we put it in CMU footings and braced it with wood.

Isn't the patina of the wood perfect?! Gramma and Papa have a giant wood pile where they've been organically weathering wood for some 10-odd-years. Okay, maybe it's more like a pile of forgotten wood that gets beat on by the sun and warped by the rain, but it looks really beautiful and we didn't have to buy a stitch of wood for the project.

I am so happy with how the arbor turned out, and more importantly, so are the bride and groom. I'm a little sad the arbor isn't coming home with us, but I already made Garrett promise that he'd build me one for the backyard of our next house!

I can't leave you guys today without showing you a couple photos from around gramma's farm. I keep calling it a farm, but really it's more like a hobby farm - they raise chickens, pigs, turkeys, a couple of horses, and a rotating door of grand-puppies. The farm is located on a quiet 20 acres, miles away from any city. On a cloudless night you can see every star in the sky and on a sunny day you can see clear across the valley.