Our Olde House: May 2024
It seemed the right time to resume work on having the backyard tree damage fixed, and the deck replaced; this of course requires finding someone who will show up to do the actual work. Always a struggle. Maybe its just me, but I get a lot of ‘I will send you an estimate’ without any estimate ever arriving or any phone calls or texts being returned. I try not to take this personally. On the other hand sometimes everything just works, which are probably the very few times when I successfully follow God’s plan instead of my own wandering in the wilderness.
After a couple of swings and misses getting someone to fix the holes in the backyard and install new sod, we decided to look for someone to remove the last stump back there. As luck would have it, Miss Sherry contacted someone who did grind away some stumps for us before, and he agreed to come by ‘in a day or two’ to look and give us an estimate. Sounded familiar. However, much to my surprise he called a couple of hours later that day and said he could stop by shortly if that was alright with us; yes, please.
We had a couple more hours of daylight so what the heck. He showed up in a very few minutes, with a stump grinder on a trailer behind his truck. We looked at the stump, verified that there was access to the backyard through a double gate, and then he said he could do it now if that was alright with us; yes, please, again. He drove his remote-controlled stump grinder into the backyard and ran it up to the stump. A few minutes later he was done, the stump, and a bunch of surface roots were gone with a pile of sawdust in their place. It doesn’t get any better than that.
While the stump guy was driving the grinder back onto his trailer, Miss Sherry and he were talking, and she mentioned that we still needed to find someone to fix the backyard. The stump guy said he knew a landscape guy who had all the equipment to remove the green stuff and sawdust from the backyard, smooth and contour the dirt and install new sod. Miss Sherry called him, the landscape guy came out to look at the project, and said he would send us an estimate in a day or two.
I had run my little lawnmower around the backyard to cut down the tall green stuff so the landscaper could see better what the situation was like. I have to be extra careful so I don’t run over a brick or big root and damage my mower blades. We now have two piles of stump sawdust which need to be removed, and we probably will need some topsoil brought in to fill in the stump holes and allow the yard to be contoured so the rain will drain and not form ponds.
We were not holding our breath, and we did get an estimate shortly. We asked when they could start and he said next week. It decided to rain that week, so we were not expecting anything to be started or completed in the rain. It is supposed to stop raining for a few days in a row during the next week, so hopefully we can work on the backyard, or heavens-to-betsy, even finish it.
We have the remnants of a large hydroponic garden that hopefully can be removed or buried by the landscapers. It is right in the middle of our side access to the backyard, and it would be so much more convenient if it were gone. We will have to see if it can be removed, or at least made much smaller for a reasonable price; we do not want to make a Federal project out of it.
When the tree fell last June, the roots were under a brick barbeque sitting on a concrete patio, both of which were thrown into the air and broke into a million pieces upon re-entry. I scraped enough dirt off of the remaining concrete patio to find the edge, which is now jagged; something else to repair whenever we get that far. We will need to sift the stump sawdust and surrounding dirt, looking for barbeque bricks and pieces of concrete mixed in. I know we also have a few discarded pieces of concrete buried in the yard, and a brick walk that will need to be dug up and removed. Should be fun.
Keep in mind that at this time in my life, I am not going to be doing any of the actual work; I am leaving that to the professionals who know much more French than I. My contributions to the backyard project will be words of encouragement, or caution, like ‘watch out for the buried live wire’, ‘look out for the water pipe, hopefully disconnected, there’, and the ever popular ‘Oops, sorry, I forgot about that.’ I have learned to be timid with my help, as there sometimes is a surcharge if I help too much. I try to avoid being told that ‘if things don’t improve soon, you will have to stop helping.’ Always good advice.
