BBP Part 4 Sod And More

Don't miss
BBP Part 1 Arbor Vitae And Rocks
BBP Part 2 Straightening The Wall
BBP Part 3 Goliath And His Friends

Thursday August 12th Travis rented a sod cutter and started cutting our sod. Since sod is so expensive we thought to save some here.


Man, sod is heavy.


And that sod cutter was a beast. There's no way I could have handled that thing.


Cut, Chop, Lift, Carry.


Ug. Tiring.


A large pile of sod.


The next day, Friday August 13th Travis picked up enough bricks to add one more layer to the retaining wall which would bring it high enough for flattening out the grade of the yard.


Tractors are so nice.


After the bricks were laid Travis took the dump bed truck out for several loads of fill dirt. Before he could dump the first load he had to move the pea gravel.


There's the first load.


Several hours and a few loads later it was time to tackle the ugliest concrete pad ever. This used to have a shed on it. It was an abomination to Travis-the-former-professional-concrete-finisher's eyes.


Oh, Avery, you are going to hurt yourself. Give the sledge hammer to your father immediately.


Kill it, kill it!


Avery helped remove the pieces after Travis pried up the broken bits.


Goodbye concrete!


Go be useful as fill.


Because of the general slope of each yard on the street, this side of our yard gets pretty soggy in the wet season so we dug a trench to put in a curtain drain. Yes, I actually helped with this part although we ran out of time to finish it Friday night.


Bright and early Saturday morning it was time to uncoil the drain pipe.


Travis is just finishing up the end of the trench.


After putting pea gravel over the drain it was time to add in an additional sprinkler line so the yard would get properly covered. Yes, that meant Travis had to dig up the sprinkler he had just worked on back on July 21, the evening before he started on the retaining wall. This was the point he put in a T for the new sprinkler line to connect to.


The new line will stretch most of the length of the trench.


Time to cover it all up


Tuesday August 17th Travis had a dump truck (11 yards) of top soil delivered to the house. It had to be dumped out front because driveways and rv pads aren't made to stand the weight of a dump truck. That evening Travis got to work loading it into the backyard.


Hm. One tractor bucket doesn't look like it'll cover much. Good thing we had the tractor instead of shovel and wheelbarrow... Of course, this is after we've already spread the fill dirt in everywhere, so we know it takes a lot of loads.


While Travis drove loads back, I worked on raking it out. Travis had to do the fine tuning on it because the big landscaping rakes were just to heavy for me to reach out that far and finesse it.


Emmett loved riding with Daddy.


I went and rented a landscape roller to run over the dirt and then Travis raked it again.


The boys liked making footprints. We couldn't fill in to the end until we got the wall finished on that side but the sod needed to be put back sooner rather than later.


After getting the top soil finished Tuesday night, Wednesday evening was for laying back out our home cut sod.


And the boys played in the dirt. Of course.


Seriously, this stuff is heavy. He loaded it in the wheelbarrow and drove to where he was working to minimize all the carrying.


It seems like there's a light at the end of the tunnel here... yet there's still so much left to do...