Project Progress

Well, we got the bed building done over the weekend. I was actually kind of surprised how quickly it went but then we worked pretty hard all weekend and the weather was cooperating. I thought I would post some progress pictures. The picture in this other post, is the before shot. It shows basically the area that we were concerned with screening.

This second picture is what it looked like after we started moving dirt and pine needles around. It is not exactly the same angle as the before picture but that is because we had two huge pallets of rocks sitting where I took the before picture from. We had ordered the flat grey stones from a local guy on Thursday and they were delivered on Friday. In the picture, you can see that we had started to lay them out so we could get an outline of how we wanted the beds to be shaped.

After the stones came on Friday morning, we went to find out about getting some fill dirt because the area near the birdfeeder was a low spot and we wanted the beds to eventually be level with the rock wall we were building. We ended up renting a trailer from a friend and getting 4 tons of fill dirt on Saturday morning. J and I spent the morning shoveling dirt from the trailer into a wheelbarrow to deposit where we needed it in the beds. After we finished with the dirt movement, we got rid of the trailer and started building the two walls. We didn't flatten the dirt out because we want to backfill the wall with some small pepplestone for drainage.

This picture shows what the two walls looked like basically when we were done building them but had done nothing else. This pic was taken from almost the opposite direction of the last one. You can see the birdfeeder leaning up against a tree in the background because it was easier to take it out then to work around it. In the foreground you can see the little dogwood we replanted a few months ago.

That was it for Saturday. On Sunday morning, we went to Lowe's to get the pea gravel to backfill the rock walls, and then started flattening out the dirt, gathering up the left over rock (we haven't figured out what we are doing with it yet), and replacing pinestraw in the working areas. Now we have the wall how we want it and all the dirt flattened out. We are now just waiting to get some plants (I am supposed to work on that today) to finish it up.

These last two pictures show what it looks like currently from both angles. We still have to put the birdfeeder back in, but we want to wait to see where it will fit best. We have 4 very big flat rocks that we plan to put around the base of it, so they can be stood on when filling the feeders. The dense bushes in the back ground near the leaning birdfeeder marked the back edge of our yard and the blue bird nest box in the other shot mark the left border of our yard. The white house next door doesn't have a very big backyard and it is much lower than ours so we don't have many privacy issues from it.

I think that once we are done, we will have something that does we need it to do (provide privacy) while still looking natural. We had a lot of options of what we could do to screen ourselves off from the new construction but we wanted something that fit in with the wooded landscape we already had. When we are finished, we will have that, I am sure.