labor day means vacation? in who's world?

This labor day weekend - and it's a long one for me because of the new job, Friday thru Tuesday - I am doing manual labor.

My parents came and I arranged to have a front end loader/skidder/bobcat, whatever you wanna call it, and we moved dirt.  Lots and Lots of dirt.

Here is a before picture...

Here's now...

We took down a ridge that was in the middle of the front yard, contoured the area so the drainage works at keeping runoff away from the house, and built up the area for the walkway.  There will soon be a retaining wall built from the driveway area up to the door area.  


More manual labor is coming my way.

Here is the west view of the house.  My son had built the window wells, and we did some more drainage work and added some sod next to the house.  Hope this works - it was sod that got peeled off the ridge we took down in the front yard.  Hadn't planned it that way, but sod is a bugger to get worked down to smooth yard.  We started picking it out and ended up putting it next to the house.  We figure it will help with erosion and also be a headstart on grass, if it takes root anyway!

Here's the back side of the house.  More sod, some rock under condenser and window you can't see, and some pavers by the back door. The pavers need to be tweeked and set in better.  But this old girl was too dang tired to really give a rats ass hoot at this point.  I'll go back and do it later - it will probably settle anyway considering the amount of fill we needed in this area.

A view of my much diminished dirt pile.  It was surprising how much was there, but we left some for fill around the retaining wall that has yet to be built.  More labor.  Did I mention how much my body hurts?

And here's my (rough) driveway!   Major fill here.  I'll be needing a load or two of gravel to smooth it out some.  But did I mention the retaining wall I need to build?  Can you tell I'm looking forward to it?  :)



Tentative construction date is Tuesday - oh wait - that's tomorrow.   Groan....