Month: June 2008

After spending pretty much every night after work in the backyard digging and cleaning ditches, the sprinkler system is now in and functional (read a couple of my write-ups about it here and here). I’ve basically spent every night after work digging around tree roots, removing beachball-sized rocks that the trencher couldn’t handle (and there were several that took me many hours to dig out). So after finally getting the last of the rocks out on Thursday, on Friday we started laying pipe for the backyard (the front year was already pretty much done last week). We got about 70% of the pipe down on Friday, I spent Friday night getting out a couple more gigantic rocks, and then Saturday we cut and glue the rest of the pipe, hooked up the sprinklers, wired up the controller, and fired everything up — and amazingly enough, it frickin’ worked.

We need to adjust the flow on a couple of the sprinklers, we still need the bury the pipes in the backyard, and we still need to get attachments for the drip system (we have the drip hose ran, we just need to hook into it), but that stuff will be easy compared to the initial task of getting everything dug up and installed.

Clean up is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt. Between all the rocks, the old sidewalk chunks, the sod we’re taking out of part of the front yard, and the piles of dirt, we have a lot of junk sitting around — it looks like we’ve gotten nothing accomplished, but we have. We still need to make a huge dump run with all the crap we can’t recycle (sod, cement/concrete/whatever-it-is, excess rocks, etc…), so that’ll take a bit of time and effort, but otherwise it’s nice to just have to do clean up at this point.

My whole upper body (mostly my hands and wrists) are sore as heck, but it’ll be much easier filling things in than taking it out.

But as is always the case, we don’t have enough dirt to completely fill in everything as when you remove all the rock and don’t put them back, obviously there’s space to fill. And I still have to fill in the sidewalk before the city decides to fine me. So if anybody has any good soil and or bags of concrete mix, let me know and I’ll give you and address to drop them off.