The Un-Garden Party

Edit: Photos upped by okiru, text by bedmonster.

On September 16th and 17th, we hosted an "un-garden" party, in which we begged our friends to come help us deal with the massive amounts of dirt we dug up in a poor attempt to level our yard. We had bunches of people show up, and we're eternally grateful to all of them. The weather was beautiful, the company was good, and we got a LOT done. It was excellent!

Here are the piles, as they were in the beginning.


And here are the piles at the end. Several of them are totally gone! We assembled screens using chicken wire and the lumber from the destruction of our porch. Because we wanted to pay for the yard waste rate, and not the dirt or mixed waste rate, we hacked at the sod, scraped it over the screens to get the dirt out, picked out the garbage, and put the vegetation that was left over in the container.




Here's the container, from a place called Hungry Buzzard. They were very nice, but they lectured us at least five times on how heavy dirt is, how there's no way to get dirt out of sod well, etc., etc. We ended up getting the yard waste rate. We showed them! Mwa ha! Anyway, here's the container when it arrived. There was some question as to whether it was ever going to arrive- turns out that they hadn't reserved the container we requested. They managed to get another, though, and it was bigger than we had originally requested. But at least we got it.

This shows you how full we managed to get the container. Good job, everyone!


Our nice neighbor, who had been gone all weekend, came back to find some of the yard work he'd asked someone to do only half-done. And he saw that we had a nice container full of yard waste... He gave us some cash and we let him toss his stuff in our container. Here my spouse is demonstrating just how solid the stuff in the container is.


And here are our faithful friends!! They all rock, by the way.




Here's me and my manager (she's awesome) working on the back pile of garbage crap. This is the pile that was housing the tree we cut down a a few weeks ago. My manager showed up and kicked the pile's ass, reducing it to half of what it was in just a couple of hours.



And here's the ugly house on the front lot. Now it's painted a sort of dusty salmon pink. It's great. *shudder* It'll be interesting to see what sort of people buy the house. I wonder how long it will take them to realize just how poor the contruction quality was. *sigh*

Beware the Shovel

I just wanted to say to everyone working around garden tools: wear your safety glasses. I took a shovel handle to the head on Sunday afternoon. Hurt like heck. Would have broken my nose, easy, except I was wearing safety glasses that protected the bridge of my nose. The doc says I have a mild concussion. Good thing I did that AFTER we had the drain in! And it could be worse- a friend of mine just cut part of his finger off while working on his house. Yikes. My concussion pales in comparison to that!

In other news, my mother-in-law (bless her!!) sent us a rototiller. It came yesterday, and I'm really excited about using it. Hooray!

Moral of the story: beware shovels. They are just as dangerous, and apparently sneakier, than rakes. Maybe next time I'll wear the hardhat, too...

Rainin', Drainin'

So, we'll fill you in soon on how the Un-Garden party went this weekend. Let's just say our friends came out (thank you, everyone!), and we kicked ass. The piles of dirt and garbage were reduced significantly. More to follow on that.

What I wanted to say was that it's been raining cats and dogs here for the past few days. We've been watching our back yard anxiously. You know what we saw? Well, besides rain and mud?

An absence of flooding. Which means the drain works, and works pretty well. We'll see, of course, when we get into the thick of winter, but so far, so good! Seems like we got that drain in just in time!

Now we just need to gravel the driveway so THAT isn't a mud pit. Heh.

Patch Job

From the beginning of the construction on the new house on the front lot, various contractors and other people have been parking in our driveway. We've posted a sign and even roped off the entrance on occasion. Yesterday afternoon, a big truck pulled in and parked. I put on my shoes and went out to hassle them (this is an almost pleasurable event most of the time).

These guys were there to do an asphalt patch in the right-of-way to the front lot house. I tell them that they can’t park there and that I might need to pull out of my driveway. They say that they’ll move their truck as soon as I need to leave. This kind of pisses me off, but then I have an idea. My wife and I created a nice little scar in the asphalt between our driveway and the catch basin last week, and maybe these guys could do a patch to make it look and function better (the water from the neighboring driveway/street doesn’t quite make it to the catch basin any more and instead finds its way into our trench through the broken asphalt).

The asphalt guys say that they can do the work and since they are already there, they’ll knock off a hundred bucks. I tell them that I need to talk to my spouse and that I’ll get back to them in a little bit. I call some other asphalt companies to find out if the price these guys quoted me is fair. After a couple of phone calls, I realize that their price is very fair; in fact, it’s quite good. I call my spouse and we agree to do it.

It took them about an hour and now the asphalt is sealed (the edges are covered with sand in the photo) and ready to direct water into the catch basin. This is a very good thing since it’s supposed to start raining later this week.

Regarding the French drain, we finished shoveling last night. The trench is full and ready for the rain.

The Whole 9 Yards

We finished off the gravel shoveling on Sunday. Whew! My mom asked how much 9 yards of gravel weighs, so I did a calculation and found out that we shoveled about 7 tons. A quarter of the gravel was moved via the tractor, the rest by us. So I guess we moved about 5.25 tons completely by hand. Still, no small feat! And the pile is almost completely gone, too. We’re glad we didn’t run out! Here are some pictures of the incredible shrinking pile of drain gravel.

We have front steps again! It is so nice to be able to get to our front door without twisting an ankle. One of our neighbors (an older woman) dropped by Saturday evening to give us a piece of mail that had accidentally been delivered to her house. She gave us a tomato from her garden as well, which was very sweet of her. Her balance isn’t so good, but she navigated the gravel pile like a pro. We felt bad, though. Next time she comes over, hopefully she’ll have an easier time of it now that the pile is gone.

One of the things we realized on Saturday was that the French drain was getting way too shallow to be of any use. The whole point of this endeavor is to catch water before it has an opportunity to get into out crawl space. We came up with the idea to use a sump basin to catch the water from our deep French drain on the west side of the house and pump it up to the level of the shallow French drain whose depth was dictated by the catch basin way down at the street. My spouse came up with a great location for it, too! Here’s a diagram of what we did.

We used some hose clamps, landscape fabric, and Gorilla Tape to seal 4” pipe that comes in low into the sump basin. BTW, Gorilla Tape is one of the stickiest things we’ve ever run across. It’s like duct (or duck) tape on steroids. Wow! We highly recommend it for all your heavy duty taping needs! Here are some pictures of the sump basin as it was installed.

In order to catch as much water as possible, we ran some pipe from the French drain to our down spouts, too. Now all the water that falls on the west side of our roof will not just soak the earth on the west side of our house. The extra water will be pumped away. We tested our system and it worked great. Right now the pump’s electrical cord just plugs into an extension cord under the carport, but we’ll run some electrical line out to a GFCI outlet in the future (maybe after we clean up the carport).

As mentioned before, all the gravel has been moved to its new home. All landscape fabric has been laid down on top of the gravel (to minimize silt from ruining the effectiveness of the gravel). Unfortunately, we still have about forty feet of trench to fill with dirt (about 6-10 inches deep). Not a lot, but we’re still not done. We’ll be shoveling during the evening this week. What fun! The end is in sight for the French drain project, and that is worth celebrating. Here are a few pictures of the French drain in progress. If you notice a dog in any of the pictures and are wondering, “Did they get a dog?” the answer is that we were dog-sitting a great dog named Sidney this weekend. He’s really sweet and stayed out of the way (for the most part).

Naiveté

We began the weekend with high hopes. We both took Friday off, rented our tractor, put on our work clothes, and imagined just rocketing through the project. We thought it'd be hard work, but we'd be able to button everything up in a couple of days.

If you haven't already guessed, we were horribly, horribly wrong.

It's not like it turned into a nightmare; it was a beautiful weekend. The weather was amazing, albeit a bit hot for heavy manual labor at times, and we got to meet many of our neighbors. If you ever want to meet your neighbors but aren't sure how, just rent a piece of heavy machinery and dig up your driveway. You WILL meet people. Turns out we have some very nice neighbors.

Friday morning at about 9:30 Hertz delivered our tractor. About 10:00 the gravel arrived. Everyone was really nice and we were pretty excited to get underway.

The first order of business was to play with the tractor in the backyard. We attempted to flatten out the topography a bit. Turns out that the bulldozer blade part of the tractor was pretty dang difficult to use. We couldn't often get a clean scrape. We made some lovely sod burritos. I wasn't that great at using the blade, but my spouse was. Because the grass was so unruly, it would cling to itself as it rolled up and was exceedingly tough to separate. Lovely. Plus it was getting mighty dusty back there.

We also tackled the remnants of the evil pole. I got it dug out enough with the backhoe that Spouse could attack it with the sawzall. We cut it down below the surface and just buried it. Even after digging with the backhoe, it was still down there too deeply to dig up. It was easier just to bury it, and hopefully that won't mess things up later.

After a few hours of wrestling with that, our friend showed up with a jackhammer and an extra shovel. The shovel was a godsend, by the way, and the jackhammer was handy, too. He got to play with the backhoe portion of the tractor, liberating us of an old apple tree stump. Good times!

The remainder of the day we messed around in the yard, trying to get it flattened. We didn't really get too far- once we got to the pile in the back, things got wonky again. This is the pile we suspected was made of garbage, the one that had been housing the locust tree we cut down the weekend before. Sure enough, the pile was made of garbage. We found carpet, dishes, McDonalds containers, jars, cans, and all manner of nasty things. We also found a HUGE concrete base, like for another light pole. It was too heavy for the backhoe to pick up, so we used the backhoe to get it on its side, then we positioned the bulldozer blade and pushed the thing in with our legs. Yeargh. Don't know how we're going to move it again, without the aid of heavy equipment... Anyway, that pretty much took us the rest of the day. We called it quits sometime after 7:30pm. It was the first long day, and we were disheartened by how little we got done. This is what it looked like at the end of the day (and still looks like, actually):

The next day we woke up still full of hope. It obviously was going to take us longer, but we rented the tractor for another day. We worked on the catch basin in the right of way first thing, since where our drain entered the catch basin would determine the slope of the entire line. Spouse used the jackhammer to score the pavement, and we tried to dig it up with the backhoe. We coned off part of the lane of the road in front of our house, and the damn thing wouldn't budge. After an hour of messing with it, hacking at it with a pickaxe and the jackhammer, we finally got the pavement cleared away and began digging. I used the backhoe to dig the trench while Spouse rented a rotohammer and began to drill the hole in the side of the catch basin. It took a long, long time- much longer than expected. You can see a theme developing here. I'll let my spouse fill you in on the intricacies of the rotohammer experience. Anyway, we dug ALL day. All damn day. You can see us here in various stages of the dig.

As I continued to dig, Spouse began levelling the bottom of the trench to get the correct slope for the drain. That meant he got to do a lot of shovelling (I had removed more dirt than necessary in my trenching). Then we got out the drainpipe and started to lay it. We tried to use the tractor for the gravel delivery, but that didn't work so well. Spouse's gravel-shoveling technique tured out to be superior. By 8:30 that night, we still hadn't finished even digging the trench, and we couldn't afford to rent the tractor another day. Hope was completely gone. There was no way we were going to finish the drain over the weekend. We were sore, hot, and tired. We activated the floodlights on the tractor and kept digging even after dark, but eventually we were too tuckered out and had to stop.

The next morning we got up as early as we deemed the neighbors wouldn't call the cops on us for making noise and began working again. We shovelled gravel for a while, then I finished digging the trench when folks were awake enough they wouldn't be upset at the noise. We had finished digging the trench and even managed to do a few wheelbarrows full of gravel with the backhoe before the guy from Hertz picked it up. I was sorry to see it go- I think I got fairly good with the backhoe during my time with it. Plus it made things EASY. It was around 10am that we were once again tractor-less.

That meant the rest of the day was devoted to us doing even more physical labor! Sunday was NOT for resting. There was gravel-shovelling in spades to be done, and we did it. We laid the rest of the pipe, put in the gravel, laid the landscaping fabric, and filled the trench with dirt from the right of way all the way to the end of the house. Then we got to rake the driveway somewhat level and put up flagging and string lines to make sure nobody drove over our drain. (Even with the driveway clearly marked and resembling a landing strip, I still suspect I may drive over it one foggy morning on my way to work.) This was, in part, because of the butt-munch on the front lot and the disrespect his contractors have for our driveway. The rest of the reason was that we'd no sooner buried the drain at the beginning of the driveway when some yahoo in a huge truck pulled a u-turn and drove right over it. Seriously, it had only been 15 minutes since we'd finished that section.

But, by Sunday night, we had finished the drain in our driveway and could once again park our trucks there. A neighbor of ours had been out of town, and he let us use his driveway for our trucks while he was gone (he's a super-nice fella and we're very lucky to have him as a neighbor). We parked and despaired, for we still have the entire stretch of drain at the corner and the side of our house to level, lay pipe, gravel, fabric, and fill in.

On Monday, Labor Day, we couldn't bring ourselves to do any more work. We were utterly exhausted. So we put aside the yard stuff for a day and did the usual frenzy of laundry, grocery shopping, and errand-running that we'd put off all weekend. Oy. We couldn't have worked on the yard even if we'd really wanted to- we were so sore we could barely move. Still are, but we're perservering after our day's rest. We still have so much to do in clearing the yard, not to mention that half of the garbage pile is still there, but we'll take it one step at a time. We have until the weekend of the 16th to finish everything up and rent our dumpster. That'll take us through the end of the month, and in October, a year after we first saw the house and bought it, we'll begin to work on the first interior improvement (yay, ceiling, windows, walls, and, best of all, heat!).

It was definitely a weekend of labor. Thank goodness it was a four-day weekend. We just keep telling ourselves that we'll love it when we're done, and next summer instead of digging ditches we can lie on our lovely lawn and look at the stars.