Playing in the dirt...

We’ve been in our house for over a year now and we finally decided to do something about our backyard. We had a ditch washed out by rain running right through our backyard. The kids had fun riding their bikes down in it, but it was not visually appealing and we couldn’t do much else. After dealing with it for too long, Sarah made some phone calls and found a joint that sold dump trucks full of dirt for $50. So she finally had enough and made me take two vacation days to work. (It wasn’t a fair swap. 2 days off for 2 days of hard manual labor.) They brought the dirt on Tuesday evening and work began Wednesday morning.

Let me start off by mentioning that the dump truck had no way of dumping in the backyard and we were forced to have it delivered to the driveway. I had to take each wheelbarrow load around to the back one by one (roughly 50+ loads). The dirt was so full of rocks we could not even get through one square foot without being forced to pause and pull out 3+ stones. (My fist size and larger. And I’ve got big hands.)

We decided to put the stones to some use and first lined the bottom of the ditch with the rocks. The plan was for the stones to take up the lower spaces with rocks and then cover them with the dirt and pack it down. It took us over all day Wednesday, all day and late into the night Thursday, and early, early Friday morning. We were under a time crunch because I had to work Friday and we were expecting severe thunder showers Friday by noon.

So after an aching back, four popped blisters on my hands, and a little elbow-grease, we got the job done. The boys can now run flat, kick a ball back and forth, and we can finally play some croquet on some flat, somewhat level ground. The next step is to get some sod put in….more fun.

~Bryan