10 cubic yards

When we bought our house we knew that there would be some serious yard work to be done. The yard was small, filled with mostly dead grass, collecting puddles in many places and in the front there was an area which we called our "desert scape". For some reason someone had decided that dumping a lot of very small rocks all over the north side of our driveway would be the most appealing addition imaginable.

As soon as we moved in we started in on these areas. Drainage was our first project and it lasted nearly 7 months. What held us up so long you ask? Well, it was a $35 catch basin. It turns out that only contractor type people can get these things. Home Depot only carries 5 gallon basins and we needed a whole lot more than that. Luckily, my uncle, Grant, is a landscaper and he ordered the basin for us so we could go and buy it. I should add that Grant has been amazing about providing advice and even drawings for our future yard! Once we had the basin, the rest was fairly easy. I dug a massive hole in the clay (which creates the problem) with some help from Joe. Joe added a new circuit to our wiring system and installed a new outlet outside for the sump pump. The sump pump went into the catch basin and the whole thing was covered in rock. When it rains it should pump right out into the perimeter drain.

In the last month we've taken on the dead grass. The fundamental problem here was again the clay. In the sun the clay cracks and dries terribly, which parches the grass. When it's wet, the clay refuses to absorb any water and the grass drowns. To end this vicious cycle we spent the last month killing off what was left of the grass, which seems a bit cruel since it put out such an effort, and yesterday we spread some serious dirt.
















I realized that I was very foolish not to take a picture of the actual mounds of dirt in our driveway. If I had you would be far more impressed at how industrious we were yesterday. In any case, we came home on Friday to 8 cubic yards of dirt in our driveway and 2 cubic yards of compost. Saturday morning at about 11 we began spreading dirt. All day we spread dirt. We paused briefly to eat and rehydrate and our friends Matt and Sara stopped by briefly. Other than that we spread dirt from 11am until 8pm. It was actually quite pleasant. We'd load up the wheel barrow, dump the dirt in the desired location, spread it, roll it, even it, roll it, sprinkle it with grass seed, sprinkle it with compost and roll it again. The only problem we encountered was the sheer volume of dirt. It turned out that 10 yards was far more than we needed. So we had to figure out where to put all that dirt. We thought we would be filling our flowerbeds later on, but since we had so much dirt, we filled them up. But there was still a lot of dirt. Eventually we decided that this dirt would need to go in the raised bed we'll be putting at the back of our yard. There was one problem here; we haven't yet installed the retaining wall. This little situation required that we stack the dirt on top of itself and not let it trickle down into the area where we will be putting the retaining wall. All of this happened at the end of the day when we were both feeling our hours of shoveling and wheel barrow pushing. But we (mostly Joe) pushed through and shoved that wheel barrow up the hill many many times. Each time we loaded the wheel barrow we estimated that we had 3 loads more. I think by the end of it we'd shoved about 18 wheelbarrows full up that hill. We'll let you know how that retaining wall goes. We're hoping to just be able to rake the dirt back down. Right...

All in all it was a great day. We felt so productive and we always like working together. It's amazing how much faster a wheelbarrow fills up with someone else shoveling with you. We were both tremendously satisfied with our results. Yes, we just have dirt now, but the dirt was actually kind of fabulous in it's rich brown even way. Smoothing the dirt with the roller was incredibly pleasing. Also having the yard covered evenly rather than segmented oddly by stunted grass made us realize that it's really not that small at all!

I hope I didn't bore you with a task-y entry. We actually really love projects, so you may see more in the future. There's also still plenty more to do in the yard. Keep your fingers crossed for our grass growth; as much fun as it was, I think we'd both prefer not to do it again.