Backyard Day 3

Now work with me here....

When I say "Day 3" that means working days. Apparently the good Lord is under the assumption that we have moved back to the Seattle area and has given us more rain in the last month than poor Noah saw before he started building his boat...

But I have had enough time to get all of the concrete out of the way now....




Or should I say all of the big pieces. I have lifted over 2000 lbs. of concrete at least 4 times now. Off of the ground into the wheelbarrow, from wheelbarrow to driveway, and from driveway to buddies truck. And my body has told me to cut it out. But as you can tell from the lower right hand corner of this picture, I can't even get my offspring to pick up 20 lbs of small pieces. Let's see what happens when they are looking for their allowance in a week. :)

Not too bad I would say. We only had one small stucco accident...

But I have been told there is some "stucco repair kit" I can get at The Home Depot.

The next update you see will have all the grass pulled out. Once that is taken care of I am going to have to move two sprinkler lines and then we can do some digging. I hope to have this all done by April 8th but we will have to see about that one...

Tick

Backyard Day 2

I woke up relatively sore on Wednesday morning. That 4lb sledge isn't much, but wield it about 2500 times and you start to feel it a little bit. I don't want to use the 12 or 20lb that I have available to me, simply because I don't want to replace the sliding glass doors. (My wife craves French Doors right there, and nothing would make her happier than a chunk of cement flies through there.)

So, I called my cousin who is an electrician and told him what I was doing. He said he had something cool he was going to bring over later....

He shows up with this big drill looking thingy. Plugs it in and drill about 64 holes in the patio. He then switched out the bit and grabs a chisel style bit and starts scoring up the cement. :) About 2 hours later and a few (okay I am lying... a bunch) of precisely place whacks with the sledge and this is what we have at the end of day 2....

A lot more progress. Now all that is left for me to do in the next few days is turn some big rocks into smaller rocks and then move it to the front yard to be disposed of.

I figure that with John's little tools we sped up the work by about 5 days. Can't beat that now can ya...

Tick

Backyard project Day 1

A little background...

We bought our house in 2001. I promised my wife I would buy her a home before she turned 30 and I sqeaked in with about 3 months to spare.

We found a killer house at a killer bargain. 1850 sq. ft. 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. 2 car garage and it was fully landscaped.

A few things about the house drive me crazy. First off, since the houses are in a new subdivision they are close together. Nothing I can do about that fact. 2 things I can fix though are being done right now. Backyard patio and some tiling in the house. Who is the idiot that puts carpet in a bathroom? I digress though...

This is what the backyard patio looked like before I started...

The pad that was in the back yard was 8 x 8. And it was a mighty fine pad don't get me wrong. It just wasn't doing what we needed it to do. Here are a few more pictures to show you why....

Here is the house looking to the right. And now here is the house looking to the left side...

The problem that I had was that it.... A: Looked really bad, and B: limited what we could do when we had people over.

After measuring I decided by taking the pad out and puting something else in we would go from 8 x 8 to 13 x 13. Alot better if you asked me. I don't like the look of concrete though, so we (when I say "we" I really mean that I am going to be doing the labor but my wife is going to support me with cups of water) are going to be putting in a paver stone patio.

Not being one to wait I started to remove some of the cement with the help of one of my young ones....



And my little helper...



We did alright but it took us 1 1/2 hours to get to this point. Not too bad for a first days work and the help of an 8 year old...

So, at the end of day one we were a little sore and had a few blisters that showed up, but other than that a fine day indeed...

Tick

Inspired by Tai...

I am doing some home remodeling. I have been inspired by my buddy Tyler, so I am going to start posting some pictures of my work.

Let me know what you think.....