New backyard

Along with the new roof that the hail brought us, we were also able to get a new back yard. Now when I say "get", I mean they came and dropped off 4 pallets of grass, but I had to do the work. I started with a king size rototiller and turned all the dead weeds in to a nice fine dirt. After that was done, I had planned to put grass in on Saturday morning with the help of some friends from our Sunday school class. However, since it was Mother's day weekend, they called me and told me that they were giving the drivers the weekend off, so they would have to deliver the grass on Friday. Joy. It came at 8am on Friday, but I couldn't get home until noon. After I got all the tilling done and took it back to Home Depot, then I started laying in the grass.


Here is the back yard after I finished tilling it. We've also got two new Cleavland Pear trees that we planted a couple of weeks before.

Here is the grass that I got laid down on Friday before I was about to fall over. There was no way I was going to get all the grass laid down and if it stayed on the pallets after 8am on Saturday, it would probably not make it. Thankfully, our neighbors Laurie and Chris saw that I needed help and both came over and jumped right in. Soon after, another neighbor was walking by with his family and he jumped in with us as well. All the kids played with Zach and by dark, all of the sod was down. I was so thankful!

Here you can see the pallets of grass that they dropped off. Below are pictures from the next day. The guys from church (Noel and Matt) still came over and helped to do the detail work... along the edges and around the playscape.

You can see back in the corner by the playscape where there is mostly shade all day. We didn't do that corner because we had to wait a week to get a special shade tolerant grass from a different place.


We used to have a big pile of stones and wood in the far corner of the yard, but with the new grass I was motivated to get rid of all the junk- so now we have a full and beautiful yard.

Today (Saturday) I went and picked up the 3/4 pallet of Amerishade grass and laid it in behind and around the playscape. I got it done just as the rain started to fall.



Finally, last week, Andy came over in late morning and brought a roller that he found for me at a rental place and rolled the whole lawn. It is really light until you fill it with water, then it helps to even out all the sod and push it in to the dirt. I was very thankful for his help since I'm pretty sure my back could not have handled one more thing. :-)