Hiring Someone v. Doing it Ourselves: Dirt Version

The question we have had to revisit many, many times with our house: do it ourselves or hire it out? This question implies that hiring out means it will be done faster and better, and more expensively than if we did it ourselves. But we’ve found that that’s not always the case. Sometimes it ends up being more expensive in tools and whatnot if we do it ourselves. Sometimes we can actually do it better. And sometimes it gets done faster when we do it. What we didn’t ask was will it get done when we hire it out. That has been our most recent frustration.

We were a little dismayed at the final grading of our property, mostly because the graders smoothed stuff out about 10-15 feet from the house, then just dropped it down about three feet or so after that. That means that our house is kind of perched on a mini hill. I was cranky about this until I looked around at other homes in our neighborhood and realized that’s just what they do. Having this little hill has presented us with problems as we’ve designed the landscape, because it kind of interferes with the front walkway, and the back patio area. And it also looks dumb. I know they do it so water doesn’t get into the house and whatnot, but water would also not get into the house using a gradual slope that blends in a bit more.

Because of the house hill, we needed to bring in lots of dirt to fill it in and make it a more gentle slope. When we had the dirt delivered, the deliverer said he could come move it around for us in a little Bobcat for $75/hour. He could also help us install the culvert near the road (we had some heavy rains one week that flooded the front of our property along the road). We thought for a minute about all that raking and hauling with a wheelbarrow and decided it was worth it. The problem was that this kid is doing it on the side, and with the recent rainy few weeks we’ve had, he’s been woefully backed up.

We ended up waiting about three weeks before he finally started, and after a couple hours here and there, and a few more truckloads of dirt, he’s still got a couple hours to go. It looks much better in the front; we just can’t get him to come back and finish. It’s been a solid month now that we’ve been trying to get him out here to do what he agreed to do, but we keep getting put on the back burner. We weren’t in a time crunch, so we thought we could be patient with this project, but when he texts to say he’ll be out tomorrow night, and we plan our schedule around that, and he doesn’t show or contact us, it gets frustrating. And now that it’s the middle of August, we really need to get everything ready for other landscaping tasks like irrigation and the pathway to the front door, which can’t be done until the grading is finished.

Oy.

We had the boys clean up the lingering construction debris around the house (which I’m sure we’ll be finding for another ten years), and also rake and even out the shade garden. They were happy with our decision to hire out the rest.

When he finally came one Saturday, his Bobcat overheated every 15 minutes or so, so precious little progress was made on this one of about six dirt mounds.

We had the stepping stones delivered with a load of dirt, and had to find them the needle-in-a-haystack way. It took a while.

He finally made it and worked for a couple hours, but left unfinished. See all that dirt he’s dumping in there? I had to rake about 2/3 of it out because it was too much. It’s tough to figure out the spatial deal with dirt piles.

I think we found most of the stepping stones. Here are the fruits of my considerable raking labors. I’ll plant daffodils in a month or so and the rest next spring. That strip of sunlight kinda presents a problem with finding plants, though.

Hopefully this culvert will help a bit with flooding around that area after it rains a ton.

L.M. does some clean-up at the edges. It was another beautiful morning.