The Triumphant Return
Well folks, it’s been a long absence from blogging, but it has been quite the busy Fall. After all the rain this past Summer, left quite a lot of “around the house” projects either unfinished or undone. So now that we’ve had a good stretch of cooler, dry weather, the weekends have been filled with lots of back-breaking work.
We started by trimming a few trees, which turned into a major pruning of all of our oak trees, we have 15 or 20 on the property. The cutting, pruning and trimming was the easy part…you just break out the chainsaw, have your willing neighbor climb up the tree and do the cutting, while you direct him from the ground and sidestep any falling branches. But the bigger job comes with finding a way to get rid of what you cut.
After 2 weekends of cutting up trees, we had a backyard full of branches, leaves and brush. We thought we’d call up someone to simply haul it away, but not for $800, so being the cheap, do-it-yourselfers we are, we decided to save ourselves some cash (at the expense of my back) and rent a 6″ brush chipper from the local Cash Savers Equipment rental center. Sounds easy enough, but 2 backbreaking days of dragging, sawing, cutting and shoving logs, branches and various tree parts into the deafeningly loud chipper hopper took quite a toll on my back and body in general, just in time for the next project (of course, I had to wait until I could actually move my body before starting something new).
Next on the docket, the front yard. No, not merely cutting the grass and cleaning up the yard, that would be WAY too simple and physically non-intensive, nope, we’re talking ripping out every existing plant and replacing the entire landscape. Yep, because we like to get in over our heads and create more work than necessary.
The easy part was paying our handyman to rip out and haul away the existing plants, the hard part was ridding the planting areas of roots, construction debris and carefully maneuvering around cable lines, sprinkler lines, gas lines, wires and other essential utilities that are barely buried beneath the thin layer of cheap-ass, weed infested, builder installed top soil. While the soil in our Rocklin home was hard clay and mucky when wet, Texas soil is like trying to dig in to 3 feet of solid friggin’ reinforced concrete. No wonder one of the top equipment rentals is an air hammer. It’s all rocks and solid things that look like rocks and it’s a wonder that anything even grows.
So after digging, trenching, pounding, a gazillion F-bombs, scrapes, bruises, blisters, a little blood, a few fire ant bites, 100 frog sightings and 1 snake, I managed to successfully replant the entire front yard. It was a project we’ve wanted to do since moving in, but the Summer is too hot to plant and the Fall is somewhat unpredictable, but this year, the conditions were right..fortunately (I think). Either way, it’s done. HooHah!
Next up is restaining the deck and fences…does the work ever cease? Apparently not, but the lovely conditions we’ve had here (70’s and 80’s) sure makes it nice to be outdoors.
So now that I’ve thoroughly bored you with my rundown of household projects, along the way, we managed to snap some photos of the kids, the dogs and some other stuff, so you might want to head over to the photo blog and see what you missed.
Until next time, folks.
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So glad to see you back!! Great pictures. I always enjoy reading and seeing the new stuff here!!
As long as you own a home the work will never be done!!!
You and Vikki have an anniversary in a few days……Happy Anniversary!!