When we purchased a new home last year, we knew we would have some significant expenses when it came to finishing our backyard. But I still intended to get that finished last year...that is, until we got the quote for the fence. It was waaaay more than I expected it to be. So last spring we got the fence done. And we got to enjoy a nice big patch of dirt and weeds all summer and winter while we saved enough money to finish the project.
In the fall we added some trees and had some concrete work done. We added a concrete pad for a hot tub...when we can afford that...some day??? And we extended our back patio, tore out the wood stairs, and had cascading stairs put in. I will not go into the details but the concrete work really almost put me over the edge. Do NOT ever use Brown Brothers Concrete! Terrible, terrible terrible! They didn't do a great job, left a huge mess, never came when they said they would, and didn't finish the job we paid them to do. Just avoid them!
But I digress. Where was I?
At first I really wanted to save some money and put the sprinklers in ourselves. When I say "ourselves" I mean Clint. But he really wasn't sure where to start or how to do it. I'm sure he could have figured it out but we had a little baby at the time and I thought the stress of it probably wasn't worth the savings so we contracted it out to Superior Sprinkling, a great company. They got the job done in a day and a half, upgraded our sprinkler system, fixed a malfunctioning valve in our front yard, and smoothed the dirt out for us in the backyard.
Well worth the money! (And quite a different experience from our concrete job!)
We had bought a small amount of leftover sod from our neighbor last year. We learned that we have some really annoying little critters (or varmints, as my mom would say) that like to visit our backyard: GOPHERS! Hate them! Hate them! They wreaked havoc on our poor little patch of grass with their mazes of tunnels and dirt mounds!
Nothing really worked to get rid of these little pests. We killed a few with rat traps but the poisons didn't seem to work. It made us so hesitant to spend money finishing the backyard if they were just going to come in and destroy it.
So we got a little creative in our efforts to keep the little brats our of our backyard:
Chicken Wire.
That's right. After doing some minor grading and raking out big rocks, we laid chicken wire across our entire yard. We realize that if we ever have a sprinkler problem we will need to cut through the wire to get to the pipes, but we have mapped out where the sprinkler lines are so hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle. At first I thought I might be going a little extreme...but I was encouraged when I looked online and saw that others had done something similar.
Laying the chicken wire wasn't difficult. But balancing how it was laid was hard. We couldn't lay the sod directly over the top of the chicken wire. Otherwise the gophers would just pull the grass right through the wire and eat it. And we couldn't bury the wire too deep either. Because then the gophers would be able to just burrow in between the wire and the sod. And we realized we didn't have enough dirt to put over the chicken wire so we had to order a dump truck full and haul it into the back yard by wheel barrow.
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| Bless Clint! Since it was still really cold in early April, I was stuck inside with Seth and Sloane. So he had to do most of the prep work on his own. |
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| We realized that one full dump truck of top soil still wasn't enough. So we had to make several trips to Lowes for more bags of dirt. So fun. |
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| Sloane kept us company while we loaded the bags of top soil into the car. |
Clint always seems to be in good spirits...even after days of manual labor and a sore back, he's willing to joke around for the camera. You might actually think that lawn roller was heavy! (It was for me.)
Finally! The day to lay sod had arrived! It was mid-April, overcast, and a little chilly!
Nevertheless, I was excited!
Clint was excited too apparently.
He quickly prepped the dirt with some fertilizers recommended by our neighbor.
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| Not only did Brian help us lay sod but he helped Clint with SO much of the prep work! He's a great neighbor and friend! |
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| Jon and Briana helped out so much as well! I don't know how we got so lucky to have the friends that we have! |
We got the grass completely down just before it started raining! Great timing! The only problem is that we noticed that our grass was riddled with dandelions. At first I thought it was no big deal...it was probably just in a couple pieces of sod. But I started seeing two to three dandelions in each piece. When I called the sod farm they assured me the dandelions had been cut at the root and wouldn't grow. Not true! Within a month, we had hundreds of dandelions spread across our yard. I wish I had taken a picture of it! It was so sad! We finally decided to sign up for a lawn company who will come treat our yard all summer long.
These last few pictures are of the yard as of this morning! It's greened up really well and so far...no GOPHER holes!
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| A glimpse at the weed issue we are STILL dealing with. There are still a lot of weed remnants that we hope will go away over the next few months! |
