Yardwork

We've been working on our backyard almost every single weekend for what feels like months. Maybe we had a weekend off here or there, but almost no weekend has gone by without being filled with hard work.

My wife decided she wanted to put a fire pit in our backyard, so she ordered the necessary materials, and set me to work carrying those materials to where they belonged. Those materials mostly consisted of rocks, very large rocks. So, I guess I didn't need to hit the gym on those days, because I'd done plenty of squats with heavy weights.

My wife struggled with piecing the flagstones together to make a patio around the fire pit. I have a daughter who is a wiz with puzzles, but she's my daughter not my wife. The wife doesn't seem to have that skill. 

So one Saturday, I spent the afternoon helping her put it together. We used a hammer to break some stones down to the size that we needed, but mostly we just tried rocks in spaces to see if they fit, similar how you work a puzzle. By the end of the day, we had us a flagstone patio.

That was just the beginning. The next big step was putting in the storage shed. 

We bought a new truck a little while ago, and the second that we did, my wife jumped on the chance to use it to get those things we never had a vehicle to get them with before. I'm not kidding. This photo was taken on the way home from the car dealership. She didn't even go all the way home first. Costco was on the way, so we stopped and bought the shed.

That's the shed and a storage shelf for the garage in the back of the truck. We put both of the boxes in the garage, and a few weeks later, when it was time to put them together, we discovered this problem:

That tiny little sticker was on the bottom of the box, telling us that there were, in fact, supposed to be two boxes. Nobody mentioned that to us, and the sticker there was very small and not very prominent.

Luckily, Costco is cool about things like that, and they got us the other box without much fuss. It took a long time, but I didn't have to throw a fit and be one of those customers everyone hates to get them to listen to us.

We got back with the other box, and started building the shed. My wife said that one of the reviews she read about the shed claimed that a 75-year-old woman had put the shed together by herself in about three hours. Turns out that was one of those fake reviews, because this thing took us for-friggin-ever to get assembled.

I couldn't believe how much work it turned out to be. Maybe it wouldn't have surprised me if I hadn't been primed by that review to expect an easy assembly. I hold whoever that fake reviewer was responsible for my misery that day.

It took us until dark that first day, when we had to abandon it because we could no longer see what we were doing. Then half of the next day as well to get the whole thing assembled. I felt pretty accomplished when we finally were able to stand back and say we were finished.

I mean, a 75-year-old lady did it in three hours and it took me two days, but still, I felt pretty proud of that little building.

We filled it up with all of our yard tools and pool chemicals, which was nice to get them out of the garage.

My wife ordered chairs for the fire pit, and assembled them herself, and the place was beginning to look pretty nice. Almost like a space you would be happy to spend some time in.

The final piece of the backyard puzzle came a week later when we put some grass over all of that dirt. My wife ordered a pallet of sod, and we picked it up in our new truck.

That was nearly a fatal mistake. My wife knew that the truck had a towing capacity of 6,000 lbs, and the pallet of sod didn't weigh that much. She didn't consider the fact that towing capacity and weight capacity of the truck bed are completely different things.

When the guy dropped that sod into our truck bed, the truck made a noise that was frightening.

It was riding so low, that I was a little worried about driving it. We got in the car, and my wife looked up on her phone the weight specs, and discovered that we could be ruining our truck with this load. We'd only had it a few weeks. This could be very bad.

We drove home as slowly as we could get away with to avoid taking any bumps at speed. Even as slow as we were going, every flaw of the road was multiplied tenfold. I was so scared that we were going to have our axle bend or break, or blow a tire and need some serious help to take care of the problem (they'd have to have a forklift take the pallet of sod off before you could even consider changing the tire).

We made it home without incident, though. I called both of the kids out to help carry the grass to the backyard piece by piece. I wanted all the help I could get so we could get that weight off the truck as fast as possible.

It's been a few weeks now, and it seems pretty obvious that we didn't do any damage, so that's a relief.

My wife pieced all the sod into place that we unloaded for her, and in only a few hours, we had the whole area covered in grass and ready to water.

I think it turned out really well. For a while, I was really worried, because it didn't seem like we were watering the grass enough for it to take root and really set in, but we just mowed it for the first time this weekend. It had grown long and lush, and was looking amazing, so I don't think I need to worry so much about it anymore. It still looks like grass that came from strips of sod, but that will fade soon, I think.