Week 5

SATURDAY

We're in a holding pattern on the bathroom until next weekend, when my dad is coming in town to help us level the bathroom floor. It is a beautiful day - Tropical Storm Humberto brought a nice breeze, and finally, some cooler weather. It feels like that first hint of fall, which gives me a much needed boost. It finally rained for the first time in forever, so we decided to take advantage of the soft red clay and work on the back yard project. We live about a block from East Lake country club, where the last round of the Fed Ex golf tournament is being played this weekend, so the neighborhood is buzzing with people and a lot more energy than usual. I'm so glad we're working outside today!

We started our morning with a trip to Home Depot, where we got all of the fixins to make a homemade sprinkler system.



I also got some tulip & daffodil bulbs. This is my first foray into growing bulbs, and I'm pretty excited.



Back to the sprinkler system. Chuck created his above-ground beta model in our yard in LA, and it worked perfectly. This time around, we're going to bury it, which means ditch digging. Good thing we picked today to do it, since the ground was much softer than usual. But it was still a task of chain gang proportions, largely due to the red clay mud that added about 10 lbs onto the bottom of our shoes.




Here's Chuck going Manimal on it.



Manimal is Chuck's term for the state of mind he goes into to see a back-breaking job all the way through. It always makes us both laugh and not want to kill ourselves. Or each other.

We had planned to get the sprinkler system all connected and buried, but we're having dinner at a friend's house, so we ran out of time. Tomorrow we're back to Home Depot in the morning to get seed and topsoil.


SUNDAY

Went to Home D for seed and topsoil. And some other stuff.

I worked on assembling the PVC parts of the sprinkler while Chuck used the cultivator attachment on the weed eater to get ready for planting.



While Chuck was finishing up tilling, I went to Ace Hardware and bought some soil amender and Moo-nure to spread over the yard, which hopefully will expedite the growing of grass!



Chuck scored a seed spreader off of Craigslist for $5.



It made the planting part a breeze.



And here is the finished product.



Now we need to do a rain dance.

We have a lot to do this week at night to get ready for my dad, who is coming next weekend.