***This post has been in Drafts for three years... time to finish it off and publish!!***
Things turned out waaaayyyy differently than I planned... and it all started with one small step... and then another...
The front lawn was relatively easy and took less than an hour. But the back yard... sigh... not so much.
The Problem of the Kayak
You see, we had our deck replaced a few months ago, which meant the kayak, that normally hangs off the deck joists had to be moved out of the way. Since then, the kayak has been sitting along one side of the yard, with grass growing quite happily in its shelter.
In order to mow the back yard... I needed to move the kayak and hang it back up under the deck. Seemed easy enough... just get the big eye-bolts, screw them into the joists and hang the kayak up with bungy cords.
But wait... not so fast.
The Problem of the Soil
You see, when we had the perimeter drain done last year, they back-filled the soil a little too close to the stucco above the concrete foundation. The whole back yard slopes gently towards the house, but under the deck, it's a bit more noticeable.
Our deck contractor suggested installing a little retaining wall under the deck so that we could pull the soil back from the foundation and create a bit of a gap between the soil and the stucco.
The retaining wall would be going right below where the kayak normally hangs... which meant... that in order to hang the kayak, I really needed to put in the retaining wall first. Otherwise, I'd have no head room to dig...
Eyeing the rock-hard soil under the deck (we are endowed with a lot of clay and rocks in our subsoil)... I shuddered to think of how hard that would be to dig with a shovel... until, while lying in bed at night, fretting about this... I remembered a wondrous tool... the pick-ax!
I woke up Friday morning with visions of the pick-ax in my head, grabbed it out of the shed and scrambled under the deck. Let's see... retaining wall to be installed between the new concrete pillars supporting the back end of the deck... Alright, let's hack all this stuff on the house-ward side of that line. I started chipping away and... that pick-ax loosened up the rock-hard soil like nobody's business!
I hacked and shoveled and burrowed my way down so that we had about 6 inches of freeboard below the stucco. The pile of dirt generated by this mole-work was quite stunning and I was a bit concerned about where it would all go but... it all worked out. I gathered up the extra concrete blocks that we have been using and reusing around the yard and started building my little retaining wall. I've found that filling them with rocks makes them virtually immovable. Our property is blessed with lots and lots of rocks... big and small... so finding enough rocks was NOT a problem.
As the wall took shape, I back-filled some of the dug out soil until... voila... the soil pile was pretty much gone.
What had seemed like a huge, massive task took me less than a day... just one step at a time.
The sloping ground under the deck was now relatively flattish, with a nice little two-block high retaining wall near the house. It wasn't quite finished as I had run out of concrete blocks and needed a handful of the half-blocks to fill in some gaps but... heck, it looked good!
Now... I can hang up the kayak under the deck!
The Problem of the View
Nope... not so fast... you see there's a basement window that looks out under the deck... a bedroom window from our AirBnb. It's not a great view for guests, although it did look better with the new retaining wall and all the soil raked smooth... But my partner had this bright idea of buying a load of gravel and distributing it under the deck. Maybe with a dry river bed on top to add some visual interest.
Sooo... before I hung the kayak and obstructed the only full-height access... I considered the idea of this dry river bed. I was not keen on the idea of ordering a load of gravel for many reasons: cost, logistics, carting it to the back yard by the bucketful... etc. etc. Nope, I had a better idea... using our in-house rocks...
When the perimeter drain was redone last year, the diggers excavated all around the house and then backfilled the soil they had dug out. In that process... they turned everything upside down. Our garden beds along the front of the house and the driveway were no longer topsoil but a rock-strewn mess of subsoil. I spent much of last spring sifting through the beds and pulling out buckets of rocks... graded by size of course... big rocks in this milk crate, medium rocks in this bucket... little rocks in these buckets. At the time, I wondered if sorting the rocks might be overkill but... nope.
By the time all was said and done last spring, I had four milk crates of big rocks, massive black nursery tubs full of medium rocks and buckets and buckets of smaller rocks. Some stored in the what we call the Back 40... some stored under the laurel bush, some stored by the potting bench. And... this spring, I had started a new pile of random rocks along the back fence, having run out of room elsewhere. Rocks, rocks and more rocks... who needs a load of gravel when you have rocks??
The Solution is Rocks
Milk crates, tubs, buckets, wheelbarrows of rocks but... believe it or not... we had barely enough rocks to finish the project. There isn't a single bucket of rocks left in the yard and now we have a tonne of empty buckets back in circulation for the garden!
Oh wait... not quite finished with rocks... my partner wanted to use some blue-stone pebbles from a local beach to populate the river bed. So we drove to the beach park (shhh)... and surreptitiously filled two backpacks with pebbles and hauled them back to the truck (twice). Blue-stone pebbles poured into dry river bed and... we're done!
And all it took was a number of small steps... just hack up the soil, just lay the concrete blocks, just move the soil, just move a bucket of rocks. Every move was a small step, but together they add up to an impressive accomplishment. Something for me to remember.
Can I hang up the kayak now? And mow the hay field that is our back lawn?
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