Mother's Rustic Pergola
(Page 5 of 13)
February/March 1998
By the Mother Earth News staff
To further extend the pergola's life, I bored a foot-deep hole up into the bottom of each post, stuffed in an 18" length of cotton rope to serve as a wick, and set the posts in a tub. I poured around them a mixture of equal parts wood preservative, turpentine, and linseed oil (a concoction used on wooden boat hulls since the days of Noah and the Arc) and let them soak for as long as possible. The preservative Noah used was pine tar; I used DAP's below grade wood preservative. Like Cuprinol and other brands, it contains relatively benign copper oxide in a strong solvent (see illustration). Copper isn't a hazardous toxin-since time immemorial mankind has eaten from copper cookware and worn copper jewelry but its natural heavy metal properties will repel termites, carpenter ants, and powder post beetles, as well as mold and fungus, both water and airborne. I saved the preservative mix not soaked up by the poles and will apply it again later to the cut ends and exposed wood of the pergola.
RELATED CONTENT
If you like the look of rustic and rugged furniture, then this show-and-tell is for you, including ...
One of the best ways to make your yard and garden more enjoyable is to provide several spots where ...
MOTHER'S SUPER-HEAVY BENCH (OR VISE, OR BIRDBATH, OR TABLE) STAND: BUILD IT IN ONE HOUR FROM "JUNK"...
Making an indoor-outdoor garden center from wood and peg board, including diagrams, instructions, m...
Build one or more of these easy-to-build, attractive outdoor benches, from mail-order plans: a log ...
To anchor the posts and guarantee drainage around them, I assembled two sacks of premixed concrete, a pile of crushed rock and as another old-time preservative, a sack of coarse rock salt. But first, I had to lay out the plan and dig post holes.
Layout
Country pergolas and sitting shelters with benches built-in demand human dimensions: high enough to enter, wide enough to provide a comfortable seat, and deep enough to shelter two people and a pair of big dogs during a summer shower.
Ours was to sport a workbench at one end in place of a second sitting bench, and so needed to be wide and deep enough for a table to hold seedling flats, pots, and tools. Wild grape vines bear fruit clusters on short stems, so the top scaffold had to be low enough for casual grape fanciers to reach easily. I guesstimated that a structure about 10' long, 4' deep and a little over 7' high would do-and would fit comfortably into the space between garden and surrounding woods with plenty of clearance all around. It would look natural, not forced or squeezed in.
To start, the south (right) side postholes needed to be dug with centers about 4' apart and astride the young grape vine that had initiated the whole thing, but the holes had to be sunk without severely damaging the young plant's roots.
Please note that measurements are given in approximations. In rustic construction, raw materials are seldom perfectly straight, and never as uniform as the lumberyard 2-bys used in conventional building. So the layout and dimensions of a pergola or gazebo dare not be as to-the-fraction-of-an-inch precise as a house plan. Plus, in our rocky New England soil, a posthole won't necessarily go down where a plan tells you to dig; an immovably huge boulder may be lurking just below the surface.
Although the plan dimensions of a simple rustic structure needn't be followed to the inch-indeed, can be modified any structurally sound way the builder desires-its overall shape must be regular and its vertical and horizontal main frame members must be plumb and level. Trim pieces with crazy angles, gnarls, and twists will enhance the rustic feeling when used as ornamentation or infill within a regular framework. But a crazy shape or out-of-frame does not increase the natural and rustic appearance as one might as assume since there is no such thing as a consistently straight, plumb, or level line iii nature. Rather, it looks sloppy and suggest amateurish or shoddy workmanship.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
Next >>
