Way, way in the back

After finishing my garage earlier this year I got started on the next major job: the front yard landscaping. It’s finally reached a sort of mostly-finished status, after what turned out to be an entire summer’s work.

the new landscaping, mostly finished
(click for larger versions)

The walls are constructed of simple 8-inch “lodgestone” bricks in a red/black color, which I got at Lowe’s. I estimated the job as needing about 600 bricks, so I purchased two full pallets of them, for a total of 576. I figured I could go out and get any additional bricks I needed al a carte. When I was finished, I had four and a half bricks left over without ever having gone for more, so that worked out extremely well.

Tracy (my wife) decided she wanted to help with this job, and she actually ended up digging a significant part of the curving trench for the bricks, finding the places where a buried gas line crossed the trench’s path in the process. She did a great job, but also wound up discovering the degree to which a job like this just hurts. It’s nonstop physical pain from the start to the end. I tend to do most of my project work on the weekends, which means by Friday I’m just starting to feel like I can stand up again without every major muscle group in my body complaining, just prior to another two full days of making them hurt again. Thanks also go to my dad (himself no stranger to hard work) and my nephew Tony, who helped with the initial bed that effectively extends the porch.

After the walls were fully formed, I called a local topsoil company to come fill them in for planting. I selected a product nebulously named “soilplus”, which was recommended for planting trees and shrubs, and also paid extra for them to bring out what they called a “slinger truck”, which turned out to be a modified gravel truck with a long moveable arm and conveyor belt that could spray the soil wherever it was needed (or maybe roughly wherever it was needed would be a better term). Jack (my son) was captivated by this operation, as I suppose any two-year old seeing a 25-foot fountain of dirt might have been. When they were finished, I had to agree with his assessment: “It’s a big mess, dad!”

Stepping out of the house immediately after the soil-spraying was finished, I was greeted with a strong, unpleasant odor (once again Jack piped in valuably here by immediately naming the stuff “stinky dirt”, which was more accurate than the bland “soilplus” moniker). At first it smelled like the ocean at low tide, and when I inquired as to whether there were fish products in it, the operator shook his head and corrected me by charmingly stating that “there’s shit in it!”. Being aware of this made for a wonderful few hours of leveling and tamping and generally rooting around in the stuff. Still and all, they did a decent job and if you live in the Columbus area I’d recommend them

After the soil was in I did a few sparse plantings. The tall dark green shrubs are Thuja occidentalis (emerald green arborvitae). The top tier of the main area has four Juniperus squamata (blue star junipers) while the lower one has four Juniperus procumbens (green mound junipers), which produce nice contrasting colors. The green mound is on the bottom tier because it has a lower growth habit and will hopefully not obscure the second tier wall. In between the two main areas is one of my old favorites; a mugho pine, with the delightful taxonomic name Pinus mugo mughus.The two small shrubs in the front area are Taxus x media densiformis (dense yew). The plantings in the small separate bed are Buxus (boxwoods) of unknown species and cultivar, and represent the only part of the original landscaping that I preserved, although they’re moved from their original position. A little cypress mulch (rather a lot of it, actually) provides ground cover and adds nicely to the overall color, I think.

Not everything is done yet. The area with the yews that’s immediately in front of the porch step will eventually be planted with a single Acer palmatum, or Japanese Red Maple, as soon as I can find a decent specimen. I’m told the best time for selecting non-evergreen trees here in the midwest is the spring, when the new shipments arrive from the northwest. I’m looking for a specimen of the “bloodgood” cultivar, preferably mature enough to be 6-8 feet tall at planting. There are also areas of the grass that need to be patched, which is also best done in the springtime.

The last part of the job to be accomplished this year is the lighting. I’ve already selected some of the lights that’ll I’ll be using, but I’m currently held up by electrical concerns. The low-voltage wiring is all in place under the new construction but when I specified where the outlets would go in the garage, I put the one that I planned to use for the low-voltage transformer on the wrong side of the doors. There are an extraordinary number of details to get right when you spec out a house, and this is one where I just blew it. I have no idea how I thought I’d get a low-voltage wire under or around the driveway. I briefly thought about just running a long length of wire around inside on the wall, or through conduit (as my dad suggested), but in the end I decided that I’d worked too hard at creating a nice, clean, uncluttered look in the garage to go halfway. This is the reason that one of my garage walls now looks like swiss cheese, as I’ve cut away enough drywall to do the wiring properly. All that’s left at this point is a patch-up job, which should be easy compared to the massive drywalling operation that was the rest of the garage. This is the absolute worst kind of home improvement you can do; tearing into finished work to correct a minor error, because in the end all you get is what should have been there to begin with.

chop, chop, chop
(click for larger version)

Onwards! Next up is the basement laboratory, which seems like an appropriate winter project.