Our Roofing Membrane

This last week Ecoroofs Everywhere installed our waterproof membranes that will contain our ecoroofs. Its a heat welded membrane (TPO) that can really only be put together in dry weather, and early this week we had a couple of days of decent weather that we were able to capitalize on and get the membrane in place to help keep our house dry.

In the picture below, you can see two different kinds of notches in the curb that contains our roof garden. The one that goes all the way through the curb will have a scupper that will drain into our soakage trench in the back yard, the others are where a steel frame that will support our guardrail and screening will be anchored… That steel frame is one of the next steps in the construction process. The curb is actually a recent change. Originally we had planned to have a taller (3′-0″) parapet that would double as our guardrail but this was shrunk down to a small curb to help safeguard against flooding during epic downpours. The top of the curb is a couple of inches below the threshold of our sliding patio doors that go between the bedroom and roof garden so in the event that our scupper clogs with leaves from the tulip tree just before a massive storm causing a flood in the roof garden… The excess will spill over the side instead of into our bedroom.

Our Future Garden

We went to pick up an olive tree today.  Its a little premature because we won’t be able to plant it for a few months… For our zone (R2.5), we are required to have a certain amount of tree on our lot. Because of our small lot we need to meet the minimum requirement of three cumulative inches of tree diameter with a minimum tree size of 1.5″. This is mostly a requirement to maintain tree canopy in the city, so we would be required to protect that much tree… But we had a totally empty lot so we need to provide new trees for it, and we specified one of those to be an olive not really realizing that you can only really get small olive trees. So today we drove down to Molalla to pick up an olive tree that we purchased sight unseen because it was the last of a set of older olive trees that a local nursery had. Its not and inch and a half in diameter, but it’ll grow.

The two plants next to it are expansions to our small tea plantation.  They were on sale so we jumped on them. We have been growing a couple of tea plants in our backyard for a couple of years that are probably big enough that we can start harvesting next summer.