Day 11: The Outdoor Work Continues!!!

I arrived in to town at 6:00 last night...way better than the 11:00 last week!  Now I could hit the ground running.  I had one goal today:  get the exterior landscaping ready for planting and finishing tomorrow!  But oh, what work I had to get to that point!!!

As I've said in previous posts, the landscaping at this house used to be extraordinary (as in extraordinarily overdone, if you ask me).  I have removed countless bricks, stones, rocks, roots, stumps, you name it.  Well, today would be no exception.  I wanted to tackle the area beneath the front picture window.  The area seems to have been a flower bed at some point, but it is so overgrown after two years of neglect.

Well, last week Dad suggested I just remove it altogether.  He said I could just take the dirt and use that to fill in the stump area and flower beds by the street.  I thought it silly at first mention...but within a day I was convinced that I would do it!  There is no need to have a berm of sorts!  I would just make that area flush with the rest of the yard...and replace the dirt and weeds with rock and bushes.  Perfect!

But first I decided to install two more air vents.  In the rooms I have installed them so far, they just completely transform the room from looking dirty to oh so clean!  It's a no-brainer for me.  $7.87 per vent...and such a difference.  So I started my day there...four screws so it didn't take long.

Before...off-white, dirty, and even upside down!

After!  What a difference!

Before...rusty and dirty!

After!  Oh so clean!

Now it was time to head outside to tackle the flower bed berm.  And as with so many other projects with this house, I had an unwelcome surprise!!!  As I was scooping the dirt up, I noticed several large white rocks.  Oh no.  And then below the right rocks was worthless weed barrier and lava rock.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!  Just like my personal house from three years ago, the owners simply decided to throw new landscaping on top of old rather than removing the previous landscaping first.  This project just turned HUGE.  Sigh.  I sifted out the rocks (with a sifter I had built to do this exact thing YEARS ago at Mom and Dad's house), and that was going well...just very, very slow.  So I decided to move to the street first and do that...I needed some sort of accomplishment!!!

The old flower bed to tackle today.

Not really much to look at.

Not exactly a ton of curb appeal.

If you can remember, in my first day of tackling this house, I had removed gobs and gobs of rocks from along the street.  After a (dismal) rain, I now needed to filter out the remaining rocks and disintegrated plywood that had been used as weed barrier (I'm not lying).

The dirt that needed filtered.

Full of rocks, plywood, sticks, and weeds.

My tool for the trade.

In order to accomplish this, I brought over a sifter I had built YEARS ago when I was removing rocks from Mom and Dad's house.  I raked out all of the dirt/rock/wood into the street, then scooped it up into the sifter, rocked it back and forth, and then dumped whatever didn't fall through.  I was so happy that it was only supposed to be in the 70's today (and actually started closer to 50 this morning!).  I would simply not have been able to do this a couple of weeks ago.

The work was tedious...but it worked.  I was left with beautiful dirt ready to scoop back in to the old landscaped area.  I would then plant grass seed in its place.  I also did this with the old bulb bed just off of the street and the tree stump that was ripped out last week.  I pulled out enough debris to fill a 39-gallon waste can.  Wow.

Sifting the dirt...

It took awhile, but I now have clean(er) dirt to put back in the yard.

Adding dirt from the street...and from the old flower berm!

Of course, now I needed dirt!  So it was back up to the flower bed below the picture window.  I would scoop up a shovel-full of dirt into the sifter, rock it back and forth, and then dump the rocks into a bucket.  So tedious!  But the dirt was so filtered underneath my sifter.  It WAS working.

Around noon, Dad came over, and we made a run home to grab some necessary tools.  I had been using 5-gallon buckets up to now, as I forgot a wheelbarrel at home.  So we went and retrieved the wheelbarrel, a mini tiller, and other tools we would need.  Once back, we spent the next couple hours just scooping and sifting dirt.  Thankfully, I picked up on what was going on with the landscaped area, and that helped tremendously.  It appears that lava rock was installed first (probably in 1979 with the house).  Then dirt was thrown on top to create the berm, and in front of this berm was an additional smaller berm.  The dirt had a high brick wall to keep it in.  In front of this was a lower brick wall that kept white rock in.

So it was a two-layered berm with dirt mounded on top of lava rock and then white rock in the very front.  With this knowledge, I would have Dad dig down only so far in the middle and back of the berm...about 4-6 inches.  This way, we would pick up mostly dirt.  The crazy thing?!  It was working!!!  He would shovel it into the wheelbarrel, and I would use my eyeballs to pick out the white and red rocks.  I would then take it down to the street and dump it in our low areas.  I tell you, having two people sure makes work a ton easier.

Scoop by scoop, the berm was no more.  I tilled up the area, and the gorgeous black Illinois dirt worked up perfectly.  I now had a decent area to lay rocks and plant bushes!!!  Speaking of rocks...today I changed plans dramatically outisde.  Once again, I owe this to Dad's idea.  He suggested that I remove the white rock along the left part of the sidewalk and just turn that to grass.  The area looked terrible anyway with all of the dirt that was brought up when we removed the wheelchair ramp.  And the rocks were so high above the sidewalk that when it rained, the sidewalk would be covered with a layer of dirt that was then tracked through the house.

After looking at two nearly-identical houses in the same neighborhood that just had grass in this area, I was convinced.  The rocks were going!  So the last part of the afternoon was spent raking the rocks up onto the sidewalk...rocks and dirt and mud, that is.

The rocks are gone!  Now time to till 'er up!

No more white rock in my yard!  Just grass, grass, grass!!!

We then tilled up all of the dirt areas in the front yard...the old tree stump, the old bulb bed, and old circular rock bed, and the lengthy rock bed along the street.  We then sowed grass and covered it with straw!

The old rock bed and bulb bed.  Give me grass!

No more rocks on the left side!  Give me grass!

The old rock bed.  Give me grass!

Look at all of those dirty rocks on the sidewalk.  Agh!

We worked right up until 6:30 P.M. tonight, but the front yard took a HUGE step forward today.  Grass can now start to take root, and tomorrow I can focus 100% on getting that picture window area landscaped in full.

The berm is GONE!!!  Now ready to be landscaped!

Give me grass!  The curb appeal is slooooowly coming together!

What a successful day.  And it was all outside!!!  The temperature was PERFECT.  I spent probably less than five minutes inside the house today.  There is just too much to do outside!

I do have to share one story from today.  I was filling in a low area with dirt underneath a gutter.  I picked up a plastic drain spout and set it aside.  The plastic drain sat on top of a flat piece of thin metal.  I filled in the dirt, then started to set the spout back.  That's when I saw something wiggle from underneath the plastic!  Agh, a SNAKE!!!  I sucked in air so loud that Dad heard it!  No scream, just a massive sucking in of air!!!  Of course, we took a spade to this guy's head.

Ugh.  I HATE SNAKES.

I hate snakes.  After nearly stepping on a rattle snake in Kansas, I just can't stand them.

I'm now down to three days before I want to have EVERYTHING of my own done!  Agh!!!