Category Archives: Building our house

Trimmed

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I have been procrastinating on the trim in our house. I finally got around to applying the trim around the window in the front of our living room. This picture was taken before I caulked the cracks, although I don’t think you can see them.

This is the last time I put an equal-leg arched window in a house.

You might also notice that there is a baseboard in the photo. With just a little bit more work I’ll get all the shoe moulding applied, cracks caulked and finish paint applied.

Now to complete the trim in the house, I only need to … well, the list is still too long.

Buried Treasure

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I have been doing some other things, so I haven’t made much progress on our front walk. I got back to it on Sunday. I was digging out about 10 feet from the bottom of the front steps when I hit concrete. It was our septic tank.

I knew the tank was somewhere around there, but I thought it was a little further from the steps and the front of the house. Hitting it there means I have to curve the walk around it, since I don’t want the walk to be actually on the septic tank. I suppose an arrow-straight walk looks best, and is easier to lay, but I was going to have to curve it around the base of the slope anyway. This new curve will give the walk a serpentine look, which might look good if I can pull it off.

This is where I left the work on Monday. The walk has to curve around those dead-looking ornamental grasses. I hope I can make the curves smooth.

There are two stakes on the left side of where the walk will go. They mark the corners of the septic tank. At the end of the excavation on the right there is a collection of what looks like rocks. That was the second buried treasure I found.

I was digging along, going pretty well, when I started hitting what I thought were rocks. Most of the native sandstone where I’m digging is soft enough to actually slice through with the shovel. These rocks were not. When I started digging them out I found that they were broken-up pieces of concrete. That’s the material the grader used on our driveway during construction. It’s a lot cheaper than crushed stone, and it’s available a lot closer. It’s also bigger than crushed rock and a lot uglier. The driveway, fortunately covers most of what was there when we first moved in, but there are still deposits here and there. This was one of those deposits. It might have been put there to keep the trades people’s trucks from parking in the mud. It was eventually covered when the front yard was graded.

It is a problem because even when I break up the dirt with a pick, I can’t get the shovel through it because of the pieces of concrete. I have to use a hoe to drag the dirt out, then pick through it to find the rocks and toss them aside.

I would rent a small backhoe for this work if I didn’t have to worry about the septic system leach field. We have already had to have a repair done from when someone parked on the leach field and collapsed the drain lines. So it’s going to be dug by hand.

Well, OK, the septic tank and the crushed concrete were not really treasure, but they were buried.

Yard work

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I am once again doing some yard work around the house. We have done a lot in the almost three years we have been here, but when you start from probably a half an acre of bare dirt, it takes a while to get everything the way you want it, unless you have won the lottery and can hire a landscaping firm. We haven’t, so we can’t.

I put some plywood sides on my 5×10 trailer so I could load it up with topsoil. It comfortably held about three and a little more scoops, each of which is supposed to be around a cubic yard. The landscape company loads with a tractor. I unload with a shovel. Here you can see the pile of topsoil to the right of the trailer.

You can also see a little pignut hickory tree which I will remove and replace with a Japanese maple that is supposed to be suitable for full sunlight. The bare area will be planted with zoysia, like the front yard, which is to the left of where I’m parked. There is a pine stump to the right of the little hickory. It’s from a dead pine I cut last year. I dug around it and cut some of the bigger roots with my axe, then I chained the stump to my truck and jerked it out of the ground. I have to do the same to two, or possibly three, other pine stumps in this area.

I’m going to spread some of the topsoil over the bare dirt here and in a similar-sized section on the other side of the driveway. Then I’ll till it in and plant zoysia, as I did on the two sections of our front yard.

I also plan to use some of the topsoil to plant another maple next to the house. This is looking across the site of the second maple planting towards my truck and trailer. The gray blocks will be a low retaining wall to level the area where the tree will go.

Some of our bulbs have flowered and some are just beginning to flower. The lillies towards the back of the flower bed have impressive orange blooms. The yellow plants are abelia (I think) and the red plants are barberry (I think). The Japanese maples are skinny stalks that we hope spread their limbs and grow. Japanese maples are slow growers, so we know it’s going to take a while.

I also plan to spread some topsoil around the lower section of our front yard, where I worked a good part of last summer trying to prepare for grass planting. That did not go well, and we ended up with only about 50 percent coverage of zoysia, with a lot of undesirable grass spread through it. When I mow this area, the patchy grass and sections of eroded, bare dirt make for a rough and bumpy ride across a fairly steep slope. Every time the mower bumps, it wants to slip downhill, so I have to angle the mower uphill to maintain a straight line.

I unloaded the trailer Tuesday afternoon. Then I had to run the mower over the lower front part of our yard to try to discourage the weedy volunteer grass so the zoysia I planted can get more established. Then I had to run the mower down both sides of Lavender Trail in front of our house. Our land looks uninhabited from the road; you can just catch a glimpse of the house if you look carefully. If I don’t mow the grass along the road it looks pretty bad. Mowing makes it look more like someone lives here.

Everything was good as I worked. It was cool for this time of year, not even 70F, and the humidity was unusually low for May in Georgia. The mower is self propelled, but I still have to push it. But the weather was so nice I didn’t end up soaked in sweat. I put the mower away, walked over to the steps into the house and sat down to take off my boots. That’s when the stabbing pains in my knees started. That’s the new normal for me and my knees. Once I’m sitting down, my knees don’t hurt. If I sit more than about 20 minutes and then stand, my knees hurt. If I walk for 20 minutes, or two hours as I did Tuesday, my knees hurt when I sit down. Some day I’m going to have to do something about that.

The rain been coming down

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I wouldn’t ordinarily complain about rain, but come on, now, who’ll stop the rain? On Saturday I had just finished spreading topsoil over our bare front yard, hurrying to get it done before the rain started, and then the rain started. And it came down hard, an inch and a half’s worth in a little over an hour. The result was predictable.

In case you can’t see what happened, here’s a closer shot.

The rain washed big ruts into the yard, taking away the topsoil there and washing it deep into the woods. I thought I was finished with the topsoil, but I had to order another eight scoops on Monday. On my way back from the yard where they sell the topsoil, I stopped and bought nearly a ton of lime and fertilizer in 40-pound bags. On the way back home from the store, it started raining, and it rained hard. We got about two-thirds of an inch. I don’t think it made any new ruts, but it reaffirmed the ruts that were already there. And it made the ground so soggy I couldn’t get the topsoil delivered. It will still be too wet on Tuesday, the day of this post.

Right now there is a 20 percent chance of rain for Tuesday, down from an earlier predicted 80-percent chance. That higher chance has now moved to Wednesday and Thursday. I will probably have to have the topsoil dumped onto our concrete driveway if I want it any time soon.

Of course I have to spread 40 bags of lime and 5 bags of fertilizer sometime, and then hope it doesn’t wash away.

No wonder this is taking so long

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I fully expected to finish preparing the rest of our yard for seeding grass earlier this year than I did for the smaller section I did last year. That’s not happening. I knew the area was larger, and I knew it would take more preparation, but still, I thought, I would start earlier and finish earlier.

I finished preparing the smaller section last year somewhere around June 12. It’s now June 21 and I’m not done. I had two loads of topsoil delivered last year, one with a large truck and one with a smaller truck, for a total of about 21 front-end-loader scoops. Each scoop is somewhere around a cubic yard. I kept underestimating how much topsoil it would take to cover the remaining area this year. I finally ended up getting five loads, all with the larger truck. The truck can carry 12 scoops, although they cut back to 10 scoops for the last two loads because the truck’s transmission was overheating coming up the mountain.

Once the load is dumped in the yard, I use our faithful Mule to haul it around.

mule_topsoil

This was taking so long that I decided I needed to quantify things. After all, I am a scientist. So Leah and I measured the irregularly-shaped area I’m working in and got around 11,730 square feet. That’s a little more than a quarter of an acre. The area I did last year is around 3850 square feet, which is almost exactly a third the size. No wonder this is taking so long.

I have had around 56 scoops of topsoil delivered, which we’re calling 56 cubic yards. The Mule’s dump bed carries just about three-tenths of a cubic yard, which calculates out to about 187 Mule loads of topsoil. I load each Mule trip with a shovel, and unload it the same way, tossing it out to get uniform coverage. No wonder this is taking so long.

It has been quite hot and humid for the entire time I have been working in the yard. I don’t get started until around 10:30 or 11 (the dogs have to have their morning walk). I break for lunch around 12 and then head back out around 1 pm and work long enough to make sure I’m shoveling topsoil during the hottest part of the day.

I took a rain day on Thursday. We got almost 3 tenths of an inch, just enough to make it too messy to work. There is a 60-percent chance of rain for Friday, the day of this post, and an 80-percent chance for Saturday, at least so far. The rain ended by around noon on Thursday, so the ground might be dry enough to work on Friday, at least until it starts raining again.

I have just under one truckload of topsoil left to spread. I can do that in a day if rain doesn’t cut the day short. Then I have to spread fertilizer and limestone. I had our local county agent send off a sample of our “soil”, so I know how much I need: 15 pounds of fertilizer per 1000 square feet, and 135 pounds of limestone per 1000 square feet. To save you the calculation, that’s about 176 pounds of fertilizer (5 40-lb bags) and about 1583 pounds, or three-quarters of a ton, of limestone (40 40-lb bags). All of that will be loaded into my truck by hand, and then unloaded by hand. Then I will spread it with a broadcast spreader. Then I will rent a big tiller and till the whole thing. Then I will spread the Zoysia seed. Then I will sprinkle at far less than the recommended watering rate (we’re on a well on a mountain and I want to have enough well water left to make iced tea), and hope for rain.

This is going to take a long time.