Landscaping

We have been at our house for over 6 years now, and with the exception of some minor work on a flower bed, we have all but ignored the front yard. Which is amazing when you think about cause it is the first thing you see when coming home everyday. It always just seemed too over-whelming to tackle. But, that was then, this is now. Now of course is not a good time given how busy we are. But we did it anyway. And we were smart about it. Instead of trying to tackle the entire front yard, we took on section by section in such a way that allows us to slack-off on it, and it will still look good.

The first step was to tear out the front part of the grass. It has been dead and uneven from day one. With Katy’s permission, I took the roto-tiller to it in early April. Keeping in mind, we had no plans on what this was going to look like yet, but we knew what each step might look like. With some backbreaking work by all of us (Caden rocks the shovel), we took out about 40 wheel-barrel loads of dirt and moved it to the other part of the front yard to make a berm which will later take on a tree and other easy to manage plant life.

The next step was to fill it back up partially with better dirt. We got a dump truck load delivered (much to Caden’s excitement) and laid out some irrigation, and there it sat for another month or so. But it looked like progress which is much better than it has been. Just the past week, we took the next leap and got 3 cubic yards of mulch and 1.5 tons of rock. Now this is the funny story. When I say 1.5 tons of rock, I don’t mean lots of gravel, I mean 3 individual rocks. The really funny part is that these rocks are actually pretty cheep, but it cost almost 5x the material price to get it delivered and placed. Katy and I are way too principled to put out good money like that when there is a far better way to get hurt by doing it ourselves (okay so that is mostly me). So we used the same trailer, gravity, Joel, a pizza delivery man and some fairly bad judgement to get the rocks and put them in place by ourselves...so there.

Here are some pictures, we are not done yet, still need to plant some greenery and get one more rock, but it is amazing how much better it looks already!

Caden and mommy getting to work while daddy sits back and enjoys the day