A Winter Look

Steel Planter Boxes

Brent is constructing steel planter boxes for our beds! They are going to be fantastic!

Brent designed the steel with notched corners to match our craftsman feel. These steel panels will rust over and look simply awesome!

While Brent welds I sift. And sift. And sift. And sift. I am good at harvesting rocks. But when I add the compost it makes some pretty beautiful soil!

April Fools in October.

I planted a pumpkin in front. It was a beautiful plant but produced NO pumpkins. Friends and family comment frequently on our large pumpkin plant in the front garden bed of our house.  The leaves were huge, green and impressive. But it is a beautiful, fruitless pumpkin plant. FINALLY it sprouted one pumpkin the first week of September.

This dumb plant was gorgeous but a HUGE disappointment. Friends and family have been patient listening to my incessant complaining about this ridiculous plant. Early yesterday morning as we were pulling out to go to early morning seminary Sierra said The pumpkin is orange!" I insisted that was impossible since I had checked the plant the night before. We were the recipients of an awesome practical joke/gift/early April Fools...during the night someone hid six pumpkins in my plant. I laughed all day and woke up again this morning with a smile. THANK YOU to whoever did this--it's now a favorite family story!!! (I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!!!)      

Grass!!!

We have GRASS!!! This is the most exciting news since moving in! It completes our look in the most beautiful way...but boy oh boy was it work!!

Our first project was to till the dirt and remove the rocks. This pile was much more impressive in person. It was a ton (literally) of rocks.

 The rocks just kept coming...

We rolled everything flat after tilled in a truck full of compost (note the flag that the scouts put out--we work on the holidays!)

A view of our fancy sifting system

Getting closer...

Tilling in the evening

Another truck load of compost

 A beautiful sight!! One of the happiest days of the entire house building project.

 My favorite shot of the entire day. Estee was so happy to have grass. She kept saying all day long "All I want to do is lay on the grass!"

The not so fun job of loading all the rocks into the trailer. So many rocks. 

Our one snafoo was that we made the main patch too wet as we were working to "settle" the dirt. We had a sprinkler on the front section and I left it on too long. It set us back a day.

Landscape grading and pads

We hired help to get our grading worked on.  It really helped us out.  Now it's up to us to finish the leveling, pull out rocks, set the sprinklers and get everything in order for the sod on Sept 9th!

 Our side porch often looks like this right now....we bring in half the dirt from our yard into our house...

Brent and Cole outlined all of our flower beds with steel (which will rust!). Required some welding, good thing we have two welders in the family!

 Pad for the BBQ and pizza oven in the backyard...

 Parking pad...

 Front sidewalk leading up to the house...

 Parking pad poured!!!

 This is our beautiful but useless pumpkin plant.  Gorgeous big plant...not one pumpkin. Disappointed! Same thing happened with our tomatoes, boo!

Trenches and water lines--we are working on landscape!!

Oh Happy Happy Day! We are working on our landscape! It was put on hold until we finished landscaping at one of our apartments.  We dug out and replaced a main water line which destroyed the landscape at the apartment.  It was a major project for us in May and the beginning of the summer.  However, it allowed us to install sprinklers and lay sod which was a good learning lesson for us.

We dug trenches in July.  One Saturday was spent running the water line to the backyard and installing 3 secondary water spigots.  That was a beautiful site to behold looking at water running from each of those spigots.

Brent and I sound awful with all of our complaints of aches and pains.  It was a lot of bending and positioning awkwardly in ditches.  A lot of physical labor but SO WONDERFUL to be working on our own yard!  It's going to be beautiful....just going to take some time!

 Brent and Cole installed a rain collection barrel and we have used it many times already!

 This is the not so fun, back breaking job: cleaning out the ditches. Yuck.

We had to go under two sidewalks....Brent made up a tool to make it easier...

 A labyrinth of hoses...

 Awkward digging

 YAY!!! A secondary water spigot! (We have 3 in perfect locations)

 This trench we forgot to dig with the trencher and had to dig by hand...not so easy with our crazy, rocky dirt...

 We placed the main water lines in the back.  The backyard will be taken on next year and the following year.  We have some major projects to work on before it can fall in place (more realistic, Brent has projects; steel retaining boxes for dirt)

Just plain exciting that we are making progress! (Have to say we owe it to Brent for keeping us going, he is the driving force!)