well I’ve taken a break from writing in the blog, but we’ve still be working on the house.
We prepared the upstairs “summer bedroom” in anticipation of moving up there, but then had to revise our plan when we realized our queen sized mattress wouldn’t fit up the stairs. Darned old houses. So I moved the twin sized bed into that room, then put a double sized bed in the pink/craft room.
Mostly, though, we’ve been spending a lot of time outside. We weeded the whole property, tended to the garden, and pretty much demolished the back yard. First we shoveled out about 3 yards of dirt, picked out a 1 gallon bucketfull of glass, ceramic pieces, plastic, and trash out of the remaining dirt. Then we rototilled the area, pulled out more glass and ceramic pieces, and left it. We decided we need to build a small retaining wall around the perimeter of the yard because it sits on a slope, and the only wayt o have a nice level lawn is to dig down in some areas, and contain the slope with a retaining wall. We’ve planned out the backyard renovation:
- digging out 3 yards of dirt: free
- renting a rototiller: $80
- 130 bricks and paver base gravel: $265
- topsoil: $50
- sod and fertilizer: $130
That should be about it. We already have connections to a sod roller, so after we build the retaining wall we’ll use the sod roller to flatten the dirt a couple of times to make sure it’s level, then mix in the fertilizer and lay the sod. I’m so excited to have a YARD!
here are a bunch of pictures!
tafter we dug out 3 yards of dirt. The dirt you see on the patio is just a small portion of the dirt we dug out. You can see the back left corner used to be quite a bit higher than the rest of the yard.
Johnny rototilling
after rototilling
this is just a small picture of all the glass and ceramic pieces and junk we found. Some of the glass and ceramic is pretty old, as well as some old tools we found.
I thought this piece of ceramic was cool! Too bad I can’t tell what it was. Some simple searching tells me that it is a pottery trademark that used to say: Dieu et Mon Droit,” or, “God and My Right.” It’s apparently the British Coat of Arms and Motto. I’m not sure how old this piece is, though.
Johnny unloading our pallet of retaining wall bricks and gravel.
the unloaded pile of bricks for the retaining wall.
next up: building the retaining wall! We hope to do all this work in the evenings after work, since all our weekends from now through August are booked!
