Sorry Ass Decks

I am lucky enough to have two roof decks on my house.  The rear deck has a southern exposure with sun until very late in the day. The front deck has a great view of St. Ignatius Church, the Marin Headlands and the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers.

Unfortunately both decks are underutilized and look like c.r.a.p. There are a few reasons for this. We are not that often up on the third floor. Generally we hang out in the yard if we want to be outside, and we don't seem to make hanging out and reading in the afternoon sun a weekend priority (sounds like a good idea though, doesn't it?). So this area has not been a priority for me to keep up.

We also had a soft spot in one part of the roof from a leak where the glass attaches to the parapet, so that corner was off limits for a while. I stopped watering everything out there in case the roof also started to leak which equals dead plants.

We also had a major scare when my younger guy decided it would be a good idea to pull over a piece of furniture and swing a leg up over the glass wall (specifically put up for safety) so he could look over the edge and into the yard. Jesus h. christ in the foothills… We took to locking the decks at all times after that.

Well, earlier in the week I replanted in the front of my house and pulled out some tea trees that were not faring too well there. My thought was that I would use them on the deck around this skylight. That skylight looks down into the shower in the master bath and it was always our intention to plant something around there to create a screen for privacy. 

Try as I may, I could never get that jasmine vine to take off. That copper casing, btw, is hiding our just-in-time water heater, which is awesome. It really works and you'd have to be running like two showers, two tubs and a load of laundry for it not to keep up. 

So here are the tea trees now. I've got a couple other things to transplant up here to make it look better and more lush. I'd like to install a timed drip watering system out there too so that I don't have to remember to water. And, we plan to devise an even higher, unscalable safety wall but in the meantime we still keep this locked at all times.

I took this video on my front deck on a beautiful morning this past August. It's about 8am and you can hear the fog horn in the distance. I shot the video because I wanted to capture how beautiful San Francisco can be in the morning when the sun is out, the wind is still and the fog is not too far away.