This first photo is for everyone who wonders about rain in Seattle. My brother-in-law left the wheel barrow out (we usually keep it under the carport) after his visit at Thanksgiving. If you remember, it snowed a lot right after Thanksgiving so we didn't bother to move the wheel barrow. This photo shows the wheel barrow three weeks later. The snow and additional rain have filled it right up. At night, the water in the barrow often freezes solid, though lately it's only been skinning over. I dumped it today (through the fence into the neighbor's lot). His grass and trees needed the extra water. They looked parched.
As my spouse mentioned in the previous post, we scored some rock. One of the landscape contractors that I work with (I work for a landscape architect) is moving his yard and offered me first choice on some of the crap he doesn't want and doesn't want to move. He knows that my spouse and I have a fixer-upper and is a really nice guy. Mostly what he has is a lot of stone left over from old projects. What's the one thing nobody wants to move... that's right... heavy stuff. I've always hated carrying boxes of books when I've moved and I think landscape contractors must feel twice as strongly about stone.
My spouse and I were in the area and drove by to take a look. There sure was a lot of nice stone. We were a little hesitant since stone is heavy and the most we feel comfortable loading up my spouse's truck with is about a half ton. The contractor could sense our desire for the stone as well as our hesitation. He said we could use his company truck if we wanted. Wow! Now we couldn't refuse. The truck is one of those Isuzu NPRs that are the workhorses of small companies. This one even has a dump truck feature. Double wow! We said we'd come by the next day and take as much as we could.
This all happened during the weekend that we were living at our friends' place in West Seattle (due to lack of electricity everywhere else). My spouse wasn't feeling 100% so I was on my own. I called up a friend who had said that he likes hard manual labor and convinced him to come and help me move rock. Loading the stone was time consuming. We could only carry 2 to 3 rocks at a time. In the end, we were able to get about 4 tons of stone into the truck before we just couldn't motivate ourselves anymore. The stone is of three different varieties: gray with orange highlights, gray with purple highlights, and gray with brown highlights (sorry, I don't know the names of the varieties). They look like basalt.
Here's photo of N-friend at our house about to be crushed by the stone. Watch out!
Actually, I was planning on stacking the stone on pallets at our house. N-friend said to me that it sure would be nice if we could dump the rock in the driveway instead of unloading the truck by hand (he didn't know about the dump feature on the truck). At first I was hesitant because I didn't want the rocks to break apart but after moving a couple of rocks by hand, I fessed up that there was a dump feature and that we should use it. N-friend was nice enough to take some photos of the process.
The stone just wouldn't slide out of the truck bed at first. Finally after lifting the dump bed almost as far as it would go, some of the rock slid out. At little more lift and the rest slid. I had to drive the truck forward a little to allow the rocks to have a place to fall since they were piling up on one another. Using the dump truck made me feel so professional. Kind of like I knew what I was doing.
Here's a photo of the pile of stone (as well as the empty pallets). The pile is a lot bigger than the picture makes it look.
Our plans for the stone is to build a column at the end of our driveway to mount our house address on as well as to build a small planter wall along the edge of the driveway. The planter will be primarily for a hedge that we are going to plant so as to separate our driveway from NE 146th Street (seen in the above photo just beyond the stone pile and red truck). Our nice neighbor on the other side of 146th is going to contribute to the hedge fund. Should be nice in the end. Here's a concept of what our driveway entry might look like.
After dropping off the stone at my house, we when back to the landscaper's yard and N-friend got some flagstone for his backyard. We went through the same process of loading the stone and dumping it. I've offered to help him install the flagstone when he has time (which will likely be in the spring sometime).
Happy Solstice!
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