Working in the Trenches

We've been slaving away on our backyard for over a year now and are finally getting something to show for it.

For those of you who came out when we first moved in you'll remember that our backyard was almost entirely rock with a small kidney shaped area of grass (who came up with that concept, by-the-way? what use is a small patch of grass?)

We figured that if we were ever going to use the backyard for anything we were going to have to put in grass. Who wants to throw a frisbee in the rock, or kick a soccer ball in the rock, or wrestle in the rock? No one, of course, so we scrapped up all the rock. I wish I had some "before" pictures so you could see how much of a monumental job that really was. It literally took about 4 months of me coming home every day and shoveling rock into a wheel barrow and moving it to the front of the yard. Luckily I got the idea to advertise on Craig's List and we were able to get help getting rid of it that way.

Anyway, a portion of the yard was already set up for automatic sprinklers I thought it wouldn't be too much of a task to just expand it to the rest of the yard. Wrong! As I did my research I learned a lot more about sprinklers than I ever wanted to know, one of which things is that if you have too many sprinklers on a single line the water pressure is too low and they don't work well. So I had to add another value and create another watering zone. After the 4 months of shoveling rock I was getting pretty handy with a shovel.

Using Visio I created a to scale version of our backyard and determined the perfect layout for the sprinklers to give us complete coverage of the backyard. This consisted of moving 4 of the existing sprinklers and adding another 7. It came out to be just under 100 feet of trench that we needed to dig.



Unfortunately the soil in our backyard is similar to cement so the digging didn't go as speedily as I hoped. One afternoon I actually got Alexis to help out for a little bit and after 15 minutes she proclaimed, "This is really hard work." Yep, thanks for noticing. Katrina helped out some and eventually it was all dug.



We measured, cut, and glued all the PVC together. Checked for leaks. And then buried everything.



I wouldn't advertise our yard on Lawn and Garden but it's definitely got some potential and it's getting lots more use than it ever did. In fact, we turned on the sprinklers last weekend and the girls had a blast running around in their swimsuits (how's that for all you folks still having cold weather?).



With the way that the grass has been spreading we should have a nice full lawn sometime around October. But if you need help with your sprinklers, don't come to me for help and advice, I think I'm retired at least until I don't remember how tough of work it was. :)