Landscaping

I think I should have blogged about this a couple of weeks ago when the sheer exhaustion from landscaping was still strong.  Luckily I am forgetting how hard it was quickly.  It was SO much work and the kids were slightly neglected, which made for some whopper messes in the house I had to clean up after working outside all day.  It feels like such a major accomplishment to have our yard done.  We do have the ditch in front of our house to put rock on still, but that's it.  Aside from our garden, which I'm looking forward to doing in the spring.  Scott and I did the whole thing.  Carson helped us a lot with the sprinkler system.  He was a great worker and we were really grateful for all his help.  There were also three key days when we had some good help.  On Labor Day weekend a couple families in our ward, and Kirk and Marlayne, and Jill and Greg came and helped us fill in trenches, rake the yard, and put most of our weed-block fabric down.  Unfortunately, we ended up having to rake several times because big storms would ruin our grading job before it was time for sod.  I put in the drip system, mostly on my own and I wired our sprinkler system.  Those are my claims to fame.  Oh, I also planted most of our plants.  One day Jill helped me do some of those.  The second time we had a lot of help, was when we ordered our rock and were spreading it.  We had a bunch of people helping us spread it Tuesday night, Sept 10th.  We made a lot of progress, then the next day Scott and I finished spreading it all and doing the final grading to get sod.  The third day of help came a couple days later, Sept 12th when we laid our sod.  It was such a relief to get our sod down!  I also did a quick adjustment of all the sprinklers so they'd water the sod well enough until we could fine tune them.  Can you tell I'm proud of all the work I did?  It was so tiring and relentless.  It is hard to do something like that while still trying to manage the kids and household.  We really hit it hard starting at the end of July so it took us about 6 weeks.  But we did a lot earlier in the summer off and on too.  I'm just SOOO happy to be finished!      

We had three piles of rock to spread in different areas in the yard.

Multitasking as always- taking a break from laying sod, trying to help a crying Leah with muddy hands.

We got some sod from a neighbor who had ordered too much a week before our order.  You can tell it started to get a little dry where the sprinklers weren't hitting it well enough because we were only running the zone at the bottom of the property.  It all looks beautiful now though.  The kids love our playground area.  They spend tons of time out there.  It's wonderful.