Moving Dirt

We hired a contractor to come in and remove all the rocks, weeds, and level the dirt for us.  He worked Thursday through Saturday, and I hardly recognize our lot now.  It's amazing how much different it looks to us.  Even after the first day, I was so overwhelmed by all the changes that it took me a while to realize he leveled all the dirt piles!  The money for the contractor was some of the best money we have spent. 

We are going to be laying out our sprinkler system tomorrow and hopefully will start pulling pipe on Thursday.  I'm afraid to voice this for fear of the weather changing, but we may actually get some grass in before winter hits!  There is an end in sight...

Plants!

On Monday, we purchased 23 plants for our flower bed and then 3 garden mums as an impulse buy for some additional color.  We weren't sure how many plants we would need and it was hard because they are small now, but will be getting a lot bigger.  We think the area to the left in the picture below will mainly be a flower garden, so our mums get to hang out there for now.  Off to the right we will plant some more flowers and maybe some taller bushes for some "height integration".  Can you tell with my sophisticated terminology that we visited a couple nurseries?

We got 10 of the plants in the ground last night and the remaining 13 tonight.  Fall is definitely on its way because it is getting darker earlier and we are running short on time!  We also installed a drip system that waters each plant individually.  Right now it is just hooked up to the outdoor faucet, but when we get our sprinkler system installed, we will have it run on a timer. 

Travis got more work done on his column and it looks great from the road.  He just has a couple more sides to do above the deck, but we need to get the railing installed on that side first.  We are hoping to get the railing up tomorrow.

We got a variety of plants that are a range of heights.  I am definitely a person who likes to see results right away, so I'm very anxious to see these plants in a more mature state.  I guess we'll just let the waiting game begin...

Flower beds

Last week, I had basically finished with the rock walls and Travis finished the rock on one of the columns on the deck.  Trav also picked up 5 truck loads of top soil and dumped them in our flower bed so that I would have plenty to do this weekend.  We worked hard and moved a lot of dirt to get the slope that we wanted in the flower bed.  On Friday, we also had 10 yards of bark and 3 yards of red lava rock delivered.  After laying down some weed control fabric, we moved the bark to the flower bed.  Even though it took a ton of wheelbarrow loads, I actually enjoyed moving the bark because it was a lot lighter and easier to move than dirt and it also makes that part of the yard look so much more finished!  The color of the bark makes the colors in the rock stand out more, so I can only imagine how nice it will look when we have plants in there, which we are hoping to pick up on Monday!

 You can see a little bit of the red lava rock off to the right hand side in the following picture.  After we get the path leveled the way we want, we will put that rock on the path, which I think will make all the colors "pop" even more:)

Visions of Landscaping

The rock again has been progressing quite a bit in the past week as you can see in the picture of the columns below.  For those of you that are very observant, you will also notice that we put up another section of railing on the deck.

We also had a neighbor come in with his bobcat and move some dirt for us so that I would have an easier time with the next rock retaining wall.  If you look at previous pictures, you will see that there were big dirt piles on the right hand side.  Well, those piles now went up above to rock retaining wall on the right hand side so that there is a nice slope away from the house.  It was amazing how fast that bobcat moved the dirt.  If Trav and I did it by shovel and wheelbarrow, we would probably be working on it for 2 weeks or more!

It's amazing how much of a difference it made to have that dirt moved.  We could really start to picture how our landscaping would come together.  The neighbors were interested too - I think almost all of them drove by at one time or another to check it out.

The following picture gives a little perspective for the height of the wall and is the token Mocha picture for this post:)  I did get a start on the next wall and hope to have it completed by the next week.  Stay tuned as we put in another week of hard work!

Still More Rock

Another week of hard work and help from Trav's parents have brought us to this point in our progress on the rock wall and columns...

Still Rocking...

Another full week of rock done and lots more progress to show for it.  I have basically finished the rock wall on the north side of the house.  I still have to backfill a little more and have the bottom wall extend a little further, but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Travis had started on the wall on the other side a while back, and with the help of my parents we made a lot more progress on it.  When you are working on the wall, you feel so exhausted and don't see any progress.  Looking back, we knew we did a lot because the dirt piles were getting smaller and we were having to lift the shovels of dirt above our waists to backfill.  Thanks to my parents for the help and the company!

Travis also made a lot of progress on the rock on the house and is almost done on the back side of the house.  Still have the capstones, columns, and rock on the side of the garage, but it looks amazing!  We really like how the rock from the rock wall matches with the rock on the house.

More Rocks

In the last post, I said the rocks were going to be delivered on a Friday.  Well it ended up being almost a whole week later than that Friday, but either way, we have been working hard on making the walls.  Travis has also found some time to work on the rock on the house too.  This picture was from Saturday night, but you can see how much progress Trav is making on the house.

We had 3 dump trucks of rock delivered; 2 of which were on the south side where we are going to make a path/stairway.  Travis started on one of the walls on the south side.  I wanted to show his progress, but the picture didn't turn out very good because it was getting late.

This picture shows the rock wall progress as of Sunday night.  With the help of Travis' parents, we made quite a bit of progress on the north wall and the windows look a lot cleaner!

We are getting close to having the wall to the height that we want it.  It's very labor intensive work and backfilling with dirt one shovel at a time takes forever, so we really appreciated the help this weekend.