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!)