Some Compaction Action

I've been itching to get all the rock that the excavator installed compacted, because it's a little wobbly to walk on right now. Also, when we turn our vehicles on it in the driveway, the tires dig up the rock and cause problems. But when the irrigation was up and running, we could finally see …

Irrigation

Yeah, it's that time. It's been that time forever, but we had to wait until the excavator was done to put in any landscape water lines. That's another reason that slow dirt mover had to go. We can't plant any trees or prairie grass until the water's in, and that really needs to happen this …

Hiring Someone v. Doing It Ourselves: Dirt Version 2.0 (Three Days v. One Month and Counting)

Version 1.0 is in this post. Long story, short: We hired the first dirt guy on 14 July, expecting he'd get everything done within a couple weeks. We didn't know he was doing this job after his other, 12-hour-a-day job. Excuse after excuse after excuse later, he still hadn't finished by 16 August. The last …

Why We Need To Fix Our Excavation

We need to move dirt around mostly because our house is on a mini hill, but also because we have drainage issues. We've had a drought this summer in Cedar City, so it didn't rain for about three months. Then one day, it rained. And rained. A lot. We didn't have a culvert in the …

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 …

Master Plan

The final plan didn't look too much different from the preliminary, but I did fill in the grasses in the backyard a bit and added some outlying trees in the northwest area. I put the shade garden and the plant schedule on a different page, which looked better. Anyway, even though my class is finished, …

Another Landscape Assignment

My next submission for my landscape class is the preliminary design portfolio. Yikes. For this assignment I had to create a functional diagram and justifications of why I drew stuff and where, two form compositions, and a preliminary design. This class is killing me because I don't feel like I have any kind of grasp …

Landscape Research Phase Portfolio

This residential landscape design class has been kinda tough, but I'm getting there. I had to start at the very beginning in getting my landscape where I want it, and that means reasearch stuff, starting with measuring all the things. ALL the things. Oy. But if there's one amazing thing I've learned from this class, …

So I’m Taking This Class…

Now that we're in the house and spring is making everything a little greener, my gaze has moved from the zillion little things that need to be finished in the house to the huge task that is landscaping our 7.6 acres. I wrote a post about this waaaaaaaay before we even found our builder, let …

The Road Is Underway, Along with the Soffit

191st day of build. (about 27 weeks) We didn't see any progress on Wednesday, and we couldn't get out to see the house yesterday, so today we ventured out in hopes of seeing something because our builder mentioned something about a road.  Yay! Yep, the excavation guys had been busy putting in the road in …