I’m not entirely sure how it happened but somehow our legitimate need to have the sprinkler system reworked has become so much more. And oddly enough – I wasn’t the one pushing this project. Our lawn guy…aka my husband…was tired of dealing with a subpar sprinkler system. So naturally we started looking at options to have our system redone so it would water properly.

Which would require us digging up our lawn and trenching new pipe. And then the innocent thought bubbles up…if we’re digging up the lawn and running new pipe, are we entirely happy with how our landscape is currently laid out? When that answer was a resounding “no”, we started working to create a new landscape plan we would be happy with (which included Steve’s request of ripping out 5 of our orange trees, we have too many oranges and he’s tired of the maintenance.)

With a plan in place we looked at our current lawn and knew we just needed to start over. We decided to have some pavers installed by a guy in the neighborhood and we were in charge of the demolition and prepping the area. Steve and I figured we could take a couple weeks and start the process. Ripping out brick edging, removing plants and bushes, removing at least two of the trees (we could remove the other three a little later) and removing rock. We figured we’d leave the sidewalk demolition to them.

Bright and early Saturday morning we went outside with the kids and started the process.
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Steve removed the brick edging and the kids picked them up and moved them to the driveway area. We started tackling one of the trees before Steve went to help someone move. Just after Steve left our neighbor (who’s helping us with the pavers) showed up with a bobcat and asked if we wanted some help. Of course we used his help.
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And before long our sidewalk was removed, our tree was laying flat in the neighbors yard (uprooting some of their sprinkler system) and nine 10ft bushes had also been pushed into the neighbor’s yard. This is about the time that Steve returned home and wondered what in the world I had done while he was away for one short hour!
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We worked our tails off the rest of the day trying to calm the chaos that had become our yard. Someone in the neighborhood saw the tree down and came to cut a lot of firewood. The rest we cut into manageable sizes and put them in trailers. We made two trips to the dump and delivered 5 tons of stuff and we have two more trailers in front of our house ready to go.
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We fixed the neighbor’s sprinkler system and made sure that was back up and running and then we picked up more oranges than I could count.
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We ended up getting far more done than we ever anticipated but it was a long day full of a lot of hard work – and now our yard looks a little sad and very unwelcoming with our nice uneven dirt path leading to the front door. And my guess is it will look even worse before it gets better!