More Backbreaking Labour in the Yard

For the last two weeks, Noel has been working every evening to clear junk out of the yards, in the precious minutes between arriving home and the sun going down/the neighbors getting cranky about us working outside. In that time he cleared the driveway of junk (we can finally park two cars side by side), and hauled most of the pile sitting on the site of the future greenhouse to the dumpster, and cleared most of the bricks in the front.

Today we waited for the rain to stop, had a brief final engineering inspection of the foundation, then donned gloves and got to work getting the rest of the bricks out of there. It sure was nice to clear out the last of the big pile in the middle, but if you check out this picture, there were still lots of bricks mixed in with the berm of dirt around the cleared patch.

I used a cultivator to pull the bricks out of the ground, and Noel put them in the little red wagon and dumped them in the dumpster. In a few hours, we cleared all the easily removed bricks.

Many bricks were so deeply buried in weeds and dirt that it turned out to be easier to just mow over them before trying to pull them out with the cultivator. So we hauled out the mower, which was in a cranky mood. There are still plenty of bricks buried in the excavation for the water main, but we'll deal with that when the final inspection happens (the city wants the main lowered 4 inches, and we have some other issues stemming from some unpermitted work on the sewer line during the foundation replacement, so that's going to be open until some time next week).

We've got some more stuff left in the back to go in the dumpster, but it's almost full! So far we have a list of interesting things other people have left in there, under the mistaken impression that it is some kind of free-for-all:

• five bags of trash (including envelopes with the address of their owner; we kindly returned them to the person they belonged to)
• a Christmas tree
• some porno magazines

And that's just the stuff we noticed.

At the end of the day, we spent some time stirring and adding water to this:

It's a trash can full of peat moss. Because I picked up several fruits trees yesterday, and tomorrow we're going to be planting them. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: bricks, dumpster, landscaping

posted by ayse on 01/14/06