The Backyard

Our backyard is not very pretty right now. Phoenix got a ton of rain this summer. I just asked J, who measures it (I'm not joking, he has a measuring thing and he tracks it on this website and it's official) and we got 6.2 inches in a few week span. That's over half our annual rainfall. And we live in a desert.

Have I mentioned that I hate the rain?

You know what the rain brings? Weeds. Mosquitoes. 

J wanted to rent a rototiller so he could plant a lawn. A clover lawn. I didn't really want to pay the money to rent one and I didn't want to go through the hassle of loading it into my truck, dragging it to the house, lugging it out of my truck, just to load it back up and return it, all within a tiny window so that I could get the cheaper rate.

My back hurt just thinking about that.

I told J I knew of a tool we could buy. 

He was understandably skeptical. We had a large area to cover.

I got it done in just a few hours, spread out over three days. I had a system. You have to space out where you dig with the tool - don't just go in a line and tear it up right next to the last hole. Space it out, and then the un-touched areas are easier. Also, twisting while pushing down makes things easier.

Do you see the weeds that are as large as bushes over to the left? Those were in the whole yard. So before I even started tearing it up with my tool, we had to take care of the weeds.

We also bought a bunch of pavers and blocks. J originally just wanted one row of blocks for a circular wall he's going to build; he needed to know where to plant the grass, so he wanted one row to judge the space. When we bought the one row, it turned out they were on sale (not marked - I hate when they do that). I figured out that if we bought all the bricks now, we could save $80. The wall bricks alternate large and small, and the large ones weigh 65 pounds. So when I started thinking about loading those onto a cart, loading them into my truck, and unloading them from my truck, I started wondering how much it would cost to have Lowe's deliver. Then once I quoted that, I wondered if it was a flat rate or if you could just have a ton of stuff delivered.

Turns out it goes up after a certain amount, but I bought the rest of the wall and all of the pavers and saved money. We just had to get the top bricks to finish the wall and that wasn't bad at all.

So we have some projects going on, but the clover lawn is coming in.