...it was really, really boring. There used to be a giant holly bush right next to the downspout when we moved it. It was thisclose to the house, so we tried to trim it back. I guess we trimmed it back too much because it died. Ooops! So then we were left with a very blank space.
Before I get to the solution to this problem, let me introduce another problem. In our backyard, we have a rather large circular planter. It's okay, but we have some issues with it.
First of all, it is huge! It takes up a big chunk of our yard. Our yard is a decent size, but it is very wide and not very deep. When you add a big circular planter, it really cuts into the size of our yard. Secondly, it gets very little sunlight in this area of the yard, which makes it very difficult to get anything to grow. We managed to find a few shade-loving plants like hostas and colombine, but any of the vegetables we tried to grow didn't make it. We had some success with herbs last year. All in all, it's a tricky spot to grow what we want to grow. So, Adam and I decided to get rid of it.
We plan to take out the whole thing and plant grass in its place. This is no small undertaking! It's a rather large project and will likely take us lots of time. But we got started on it a couple weeks ago. Adam had the brilliant idea to put some of the paver stones to good use on the boring side of our house. There's also a layer of gravel at the bottom of the circle that we plan to use as a base for the concrete pad of the shed we are hopefully going to build this summer.
We decided to use the paver stones to help dress up the boring side of our house by creating a planter bed/retaining wall. I had a pretty good vision of what it could look like and Adam's engineering mind knew exactly what to do to make it happen.
The first step was to decide where to put the paver stones. To do so, we set up a string line to indicate where the paver stones should go. Since the yard slopes downward towards the backyard, we'll have to put more than one row of pavers towards the end of the planter bed.
Once we had our string set, we could get started with the hard part. I feel a little silly saying "we" since I did very little of the manual labor. I did important jobs like washing off the dirt clumps off the paver stones with a garden hose and wandering around the garage looking for tools that Adam needed.
Adam got started on the hard work. He buried the downspout, dug a trench to set the paver stones into place in, added sand to stabilize the paver stones, and ever-so-carefully placed each stone in a level fashion.
I never seem to fully grasp just how much time and effort house projects take. And if it were up to me to complete all these house projects I have visions of, I'd be in big trouble and have a bunch of half-finished projects.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I welcome your thoughts!