The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[ScottyB]

to prevent my impending insanity being stuck in covid purgatory i got to work trying to make my yard suck less.  we have an ongoing issue with water control.  our house has no gutters (its a southern thing) and the people that built the house did a shit job trenching the back yard for rain water evac.  as a result, we get water washing out our beds from what pours off the roof along with all of it settling against the edge of the bed from the poorly placed low point.  as a result it carries off all the mulch and topsoil, weeds move in, we can't keep it nice, etc etc.  

as a side project, we also junked the rain barrels.  they don't catch enough to be useful in drought times, they're fragile, harbor mosquitoes, and with no gutters they can only catch so much if its really flying off the roof.

what we started with.  looking at the pics now, wow it just looks so shitty.  big yikes.




in part to find dirt to fill in the bed, and in part to cut down the steepness of the hill coming down off the backyard, i got the tiller out and ripped out about 6in of height from the hillside.  this allowed me to gain about 1-2 inches throughout the bed, but not full coverage and not the height i wanted.


one of the big benefits though, was i was able to dig out the grass and add a layer of dirt and sod up against the bed to bring the low point out from the edge.  i also moved the edge of the bed back a foot to help us get away from the low point, and give us less area to have to build the dirt level up.


here you can better see the trench formed, about 2 feet out from the edge of the bed.


then things got super weird and TruGreen mistakenly doused our whole back yard with herbicides by accident one day (they were supposed to go to house 707, and we're 701.  guy must have read the numbers in a hurry).  wife has 3 organic gardens, kid and dog play there, so it never gets treated.  raised hell, TruGreen wanted to make good on it, and we got a truckload of replacement dirt and manure to replace the stuff in the gardens as a precaution.  as it turns out, the gardens don't seem to be too affected so in a nice twist i was able to take the dirt out of 1 garden and use it to fully bring the dirt level up on the bed.

about 1000lbs of river stone, 1 roll of weed guard, and some leftover pavers later



i'm already getting some grass coming up from the hillside i cut out and the water has been following the new trench nicely.  hacked back the rosemary bush while we were at it.