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.