Progress!

Brad worked all day on Saturday, so the yard remained the same. But he had this morning off, so we got crackin' on the retaining wall. Once the wall is done, we can start leveling the rest of the dirt. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can get grass! It was soooo cold today too! I think the high was in the low 60's, but it didn't feel that hot. I was freezing! I had to put on extra layers. Of course, we have lots of shade still, even after taking down 20 trees.

I have to confess that I had no idea what a pain it was to build a retaining wall. Besides the digging, laying limestone and smashing it, laying the sand, laying the bricks at exactly the same distance and then leveling them all, it took pretty much all day, just to get what we did done. Of course, we did other things too, like lay down the drainage pipe that will be going through the wall. And digging up the bricks in the way of the drainage pipes. Holy cow we brought in a lot of dirt. I didn't realize how much until I had to dig down to the bricks. They had been under the stairs we removed, so they weren't taken out before the dirt was brought in. Once we got the initial layer of the wall down, the rest went a lot faster. But that first row took ages!

Brad thinks I'll be in too much pain from all of the bricks and such, so he had me take some Aleve (a benefit of not nursing!) and gave me more to take tonight.

Here are the pictures. The first 2 pictures are before we started the wall. No, I don't dress up to do heavy lifting, so stop laughing now. It is going to be a 2 layer wall since the basement window and the utilites prevent us from coming all the way across. It should look good when we are done. I just wish we had more time with Brad home so we could get it done sooner.