Digging A Hole

by Wells

Today me and the wife committed to doing a lot of housework and cleaning indoors and ended up meeting a lot of our outdoor goals instead.  The front yard was getting embarrassing.  The house came with a little postage stamp of dirt in front next to the driveway, complete with a big wooden trellis stood up vertically in the center surrounded by five big igneous rocks like the Stonehenge of Fairview, NJ.  We guess it was for flowering ivy to climb up.  It had to go.  The lawn, for its part, was blanketed in low green moss behind the trellis, and spotted with white dead grass and tufts of fresh crab grass in the front half.

This lawn, such as it is, is right in front of the downstairs bedroom (or office, or whatever) window, so we figured we’d put a shrub or something in front of that to discourage peepers, etc.

We knew before we spread grass seed we’d want to take out the trellis and move the rocks away from the altar in our yard.  Piece of cake, right?  The trellis was bolted to some hardcore stakes, the tops of which resembled the kind of metal they attach stop signs to.  We’d just have to pull those two poles out of the dirt and turn the dirt over the holes.  So we tugged and levered and cursed and could not budge them.  We dug holes around the metal stakes and when we tried levering one of them up again, all the dirt between the two of them shifted as well, as if they were connected beneath the surface.  Spoiler alert: they were.

It turns out these metal stakes were planted in a pretty big slab under our yard, heavy enough that after we’d unearthed it it took both of us to maneuver it around by hand, and a hand truck to move it to the back yard and into our outdoor we’ll-deal-with-it-later garbage pile.

Slab and trellis, exhumed

We filled in the big hole this mother had left and raked up all the clods of crabgrass and the moss and turned over all the dirt, then spread the grass seed. and raked it again.  Now, they say, we just have to water it every day until it’s grass.

Land, scaped

The wife also planted a trio of azaleas under the office, bedroom, whatever window.  Presumably they will all have purple flowers some fine day.

You might notice a black sprinkler head poking up right in the middle of it all like a mole’s periscope.  I’m lobbying to obstruct it with one of those lawn whirligigs that looks like two lumberjacks sawing a log whenever the wind blows.  We’ll how how the wife responds.

So, what indoor work did we defer in favor of all this playing in the dirt (we also weeded a lot of the garden border in the backyard)?  This week we’re supposed to

• Take the doors off the old kitchen’s cabinets
• Remove the hanging cabinets
• Install the bathroom window trim
• Bundle cardboard
• Clean the house
• Attend Lebowski Fest
• Punch another hole in the kitchen wall because of something about the ducts?  I’m not clear on this one.  I think the wife might just like punching holes in the wall which, hey, who can blame anyone for that?
• Get estimates from a guy to fill our oil tank, Home Depot to sell us new cabinets, and I guess Verizon to see if FIOS is cheaper than Time Warner Cable

Right, piece of cake.