Ok. So I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Not awesome like Ty Pennington, but I sure like to pretend that I am. So when looking for a house we searched for a foreclosure that we could fix up on our own. We found a great deal on a house that only needed a minimal amount of work. We put in new floors, painted, redid the kitchen cabinets, added some molding…you know, the usual stuff.

However, my usual procrastination set in when it came to do some landscaping in the front yard. The real issue was that I didn’t want to pay for brick or stone to put in. I have a fairly strict policy about not paying for rocks. So after days months of sifting through craigslist posts, I finally struck brick. A guy tore down a wall in his house and offered them to anyone willing to take them. Done…sign me up for that!

After work one day I dropped by and loaded up the civic with as much as my poor little car could handle. And then, to make the trip worth it, I went ahead and loaded up the floorboards with some brick as well. My car was riding pretttty low when I took off. And by that, I mean that the neighbors were gawking. And by that, I mean that one old guy taking a walk actually stopped to advise me against whatever it was that I was doing. I thanked him and carried on. I’m surprised there’s not a picture of me on failblog trying to load up my mini-me-mobile with a few hundred bricks. But hey, I made it, right?

So then after days weeks of bricks sitting in my garage, I finally got to work. I drew up a design in CAD (not that I needed to, but because I could), and laid out the bricks based on that pattern.

For the first couple of days months, I just used a manual dirt-digger-upper to tear up the grass. Not fun. There’s my parsimoniousness again. We had to rush at the end to get ready for Brandon’s birthday party though, so I traded in the manual dirt-digger-upper and rented an actual tiller. Um…not sure why I didn’t do this in the first place. This thing was awesome! The tiller tore through our yard like my 1 year old tears through a plate of spaghetti o’s. I kind of expected to have push it around (like a lawnmower), but this beast was pulling me around the yard.  Maybe it’s a guy thing, but man it sure is fun to be in control of a piece of machinery like that. One that can seriously do some damage. I even managed to only tear up one sprinkler head. So, yes, not only do we have landscaping, we also have a geyser in our front yard. Try getting that from a professional.

So yeah, my cross training for this week was definitely working in the yard. It sure is pretty though. All I have for now is mid-pictures. No before, and no after pictures, but I’ll try to post some at some point. Enjoy!

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