Landscaping

It has been QUITE a while since I've posted. I could blame it on married life being too consuming or too boring :) or being a very busy career woman or the training for "my fastest 5K" or just plain apathy, but I'll let you choose.

On a side note, I ran that 5K last weekend and rocked it. I'm not sure what constitutes a "fast" time for you, but I dropped 3 1/2 minutes on my previous time and that was even with the wind and the rain and the cold temperatures. All in all I finished in the top 3.6% of all the 3,000+ women who ran that day.

The more exciting & consuming project we have going on right now is our yard work. Last year we were too broke and too busy planning the wedding to do anything at all in our back yard except let the dog pee in it. Now we have a great, grand, glorious landscaping design provided by my dad, residential landscape artchitect-extraordinaire. Unfortunately it doesn't come with free installation, so that is what my Christopher and I have been doing nearly every weekend since the start of February. Here is a little photo time line of our progress.

First you have to plant the posts:

It doesn't look like much, but it pretty much took us all weekend to do this. First you have to measure out all sorts of lines to make sure the posts are even with each other along their fronts, their backs, their tops and that the tops are all at the right spot relative to the house and patio and plans. Then you have to buy the posts, which isn't all that easy when you don't possess a truck. Then you dig the fence post holes with the borrowed fence post hole digger, make sure the post is exactly the right depth, reinforce its footing with a certain type of gravel and really make sure the sucker is in there and isn't going to move. Oh, and make sure it is still perfectly straight and in line with everything it is supposed to be in line with.

We were going pretty well until we found the bomb shelter buried in our backyard. I'm not sure it is a bomb shelter, but it sort of makes sense as the house next door was built in the 50's and was super-posh at the time and our lot used to be their yard. Whatever it was though, we definitely found the remnants of concrete walls going at least 3 feet down into the backyard. At first we thought there were just some cinder blocks we would have to dig out, but then realized it was two solid concrete walls in the corner of our yard. After exerting much energy trying to remove the walls, in the end we opted for avoiding the walls and placed our posts elsewhere. Luckily we only had to make one slight modification to the plan in order to accommodate the bomb shelter.

Next come reinforcing 2x4's and lattice work:

Photo was taken through the screen of our upstairs window - I apologize for the quality.

Again, it doesn't look like a whole lot and it still took much of the weekend. This time my Christopher had to buy an assortment of wood and then, see those fancy scalloped bits that support the 1x2's? Those don't come like that, they come like normal 2x4's and then my Christopher had to carve out the shape for each piece. After he cut them, I sanded them vigorously to smooth out the edges and make them all match a little better. Then each piece had to be screwed into place. For the structural 2x4's running between the posts I would stand on a cinder block on my tip toes and hold the piece of wood above my head (exactly level too) while Christopher attached them to the posts. Otherwise, however, this step was mostly Christopher.

The walls and boulders and trenches:

The photo is actually multiple spliced together, which explains the not-so-level look of the walls. In real life I promise they are as perfect as my engineering husband.

Here I've combined three weekends into one. One weekend we built the wood walls running between the posts (splicing multiple photos together gives the walls a lopsided look, I promise they are straight and true), the next we went up to the rock quarry to pick out our boulders and rock and next we dug trenches outlining where the rock walls will go. In between there was a good amount of schlepping rocks from the front yard to the back and staining the lattice work so it won't turn grey.

This is what 11,000 pounds of rock in your front yard looks like. Actually, that is probably closer to 9 or 10 thousand. There was a chunk dumped on the other side of the driveway as well. The truck backed up onto our driveway, lifted its load and slid it all off. And somehow they managed to miss our driveway entirely and we got only a couple of little dents in our concrete.

And the latest step - building the walls (and filling with dirt):

Wednesday night my dad and his main rock guy, Dan, came over to help us set our several-hundred-pound boulders. Physically we would not have been able to do this without them. From an expertise perspective, we also don't know the first thing about wrestling a 300 pound rock and making it sit exactly the way you want it to (and keep it sitting there.) Between them Dan and my dad have a solid 30-years of experience, so we got the main boulders set. And now we just have to build the walls. This picture is the result of about 6 hours of tossing rocks around our backyard. It is actually extremely challenging to make heavy, irregular rocks fit together in a way that is structurally sound, pleasant to the eye and will keep the dirt inside the beds.

Except for a few revisions needed on the top layer the little bed on the left right is basically done. The rest are somewhat outlined, but really we have very little done beyond setting the foundation rocks. The bit on the far left is coming along, but everything else has a very long ways to go. Particularly the inside lines as those walls need to be built up to about 2 1/2 feet high - twice as high as the little bed on the far left.

This afternoon we hope to schlep the last of the rock into the backyard (I think we have about 3,500 pounds left to go - no problem!) and then during the evenings this week and days next weekend, we'll build our walls as we can. I'll try to post an update next weekend. Hopefully we'll have a good chunk done at that point!

The more done bit.

The maybe needs re-doing and is no where near done bit.

The kinda in process and what is there is good but still needs a whole lot of work bit.