Remember that Big Pile of Dirt? by Picardy Project

landscaping

Remember that Big Pile of Dirt?

By Picardy Project on Nov 17, 2011

Well, you might be asking, "which pile of dirt?" But I'm talking about the giant one in the front yard. Yeah, this one

And you might remember that about 6 weeks ago when Chris' cousin was staying with us that he and Sean worked on digging a trench around the border so we could build a small retaining wall and make a nice raised bed out of this ugly pile of dirt

But that we forgot we'd have to dig the trench deeper towards the back to accommodate for the pitch of the yard

Well, 2 weekends ago we finally got back to it (the rain and wind thwarted our patio completion and retaining wall plans for a couple weeks there). So we broke out the shovels and got to work digging out more of the trench

We used a level to make sure that we were digging to a proper depth to lay our first row of retaining wall stones

Once we dug out enough to get the level right, we started laying in the stones

Once the first row was done and we were sure things were level, on the same plane and pitched correctly, laying the next row went really quickly

But when we got around to the other side of the trench we realized, duh, we should have checked to make sure the 90 degree turn of stones would fit in the ditch we dug

Doh! So I had to break out the shovel again and dig out more of the trench so that the stones would fit

While I dug, Chris worked on laying more stones

But once I got the digging done we got the stones down pretty quickly

Pretty quickly after that point the sun went behind the house and we lost a lot of light very quickly (damn time change). But the next day we were able to make a lot more progress and make that pile of dirt look a lot nicer :)