School may be officially over for less than a week, but my
family is plunging headfirst into summer vacation. The backpacks
aren’t even cleaned out, but we will be in New York by the time you
read this column.
School may be officially over for less than a week, but my family is plunging headfirst into summer vacation. The backpacks aren’t even cleaned out, but we will be in New York by the time you read this column. I am taking my three kids and the dog while my husband stays home to work and water the new lawn in the backyard.
In what can only be called a terrible lapse of judgment, we decided to devote the weekend immediately following the end of the school year to renovating our backyard. Now, I am an avid HGTV viewer, so I have seen backyard landscaping done by Surprise Gardeners and Weekend Warriors. I know it can be done. However, I realized this weekend that what my family lacks in terms of horticultural knowledge (aka “green thumbs”) we more than make up for in sheer tenacity.
It was never my intention to make my backyard a do-it-yourself project. However, our search for someone to do a small landscape job was fruitless. I left messages with half a dozen yard service people, and only one called me back. He would have gotten the job had he bothered to show up for either of his scheduled appointments. One would think that there wasn’t a recession. After a week of waiting for any phone call, we decided to just get it done ourselves.
We threw ourselves into the task; probably because we were so pressed for time. I watched my 70-pound son tear up roots and bushes as if he were a descendant of Paul Bunyan. The big payoff for him was being able to ride to the dump in a rented truck to dispose of our former yard. My youngest daughter weighs about 60 pounds, and is low to the ground. She got to pull up those pesky little weeds which are so back-breaking for her dad and me. My oldest daughter worked around her social schedule, and half the time she was sweeping with one hand while talking on the phone with her free hand.
I am lucky that my husband is strong, because there was a lot of heavy equipment and machinery around this weekend. He was also able to swing an axe that I could barely lift. He looked quite comfortable behind the wheel of the rented truck, which frightens me a little bit. I see a pickup in my future. Doing yard work means many trips to the home improvement stores. There are three now in Gilroy, and we hit them all. Watching my husband and son walk through these establishments is one of life’s little joys to me. I tell my husband that the nirvana he feels in Orchard Supply is the way I feel while shoe shopping. He can finally relate to me.
After finishing up the weeding and the pruning on Sunday night, we rested. First thing Monday morning, we made a trip to the grass farm to pick up a pallet of sod. By Monday evening, our new back lawn was in. On Tuesday morning, additional sod was picked up to fill in the bare spots.
Nick and the kids did the dirty work, while I spent the day doing laundry. Our flight was leaving at 10 that night, so I knew that we should plan on packing before dinner. We booked ourselves on the red-eye because it’s our dog’s first flight. This column is being written as I wait for the dryer to stop and attempt to remember if I own an iron and where I would have hidden it.
I figure that we saved ourselves about $500 by doing the job ourselves, and that should just about cover the cost of a Broadway show and dinner in New York. This was an exhausting weekend. I am now officially taking myself out of the running for any of those home improvement shows. When we return to Gilroy, there will be flowers to plant, and new garden accessories to pick out, but the bulk of the work is finished. I think next year we will do any other home improvement project over spring break.