Our BIG Summer Project

We now have a usable, playable, enjoyable backyard! We love it, it was a ton of work but now that it's done it was definitely worth it.  We started working on the backyard the beginning of June and finished it the end of August. Anybody who has been to Las Vegas knows that June-August are the most miserable months we have, and the heat is intense! We got very sweaty! We would start working every night around 5 and stop around 11. We worked pretty much every night except for when we were out of town. When we moved in there was already a retaining wall but we pushed it back about 4 feet to give us more usable space and we added two more rows of bricks to it.  That may not sound like a big deal, but out of everything we did the process of moving the wall back was by far the hardest thing. First we had to take down all of the bricks to get them out of the way, and each one weighs 60 pounds, with a total of 245 bricks that equals 14,700 pounds!  Then the real work began, we spent hour after hour after hour, night after night digging away at all of the extra dirt. Mason and I each had our own pick axe and got very familiar with it, this is the definition of backbreaking work, man was it hard dirt! Mason built a grate that we poured all of the extra dirt through to separate the dirt from the rocks. We kept the dirt to smooth out our lot and hauled away 8 big truckloads of rocks and big boulders to the desert. Once we had that done the rest seemed like a piece of cake and was kind of fun because things started to look good. I'm really happy with how everything turned out.

This is how real boys go #2

Dirt Biking in Undies

This is a picture of the grate that Mason built to sift our dirt. I'm so glad that he is so handy, he did a great job on everything, smoothing out our lot, building a nice straight wall, installing the sprinkling system. He's great!

The boys loved "helping."

Finally...the day for grass has come!

I made Mason take a picture of the tools he made before we got rid of them. The picture above is the ramp Mason made to push the wheelbarrow up into his Dad's truck so that he could just dump the wheelbarrow rather than us having to shovel into the truck. Below is a picture of the grate for sifting dirt and something he made to help smooth out the dirt, I thought it was pretty clever.