That’s OK… I Didn’t Need My Back Anyway |

That’s OK… I Didn’t Need My Back Anyway

Two weeks ago I mentioned my plans to get our yard ready for the summer and more specifically for a baby shower I’m throwing in June. This plan included a fairly tight timeline. Right after I wrote that post, I got to work. And the work that first week lasted ALL day EVERY day from Tuesday until Saturday night at 10:30 p.m. The week after that I was putting in a measly 5 to 8 hours per day.

I’ve done a lot of projects in my life, but I have never done so much manual labor for such long periods at a time over so many consecutive days. OUCH! I woke up every morning barely able to walk, my hands not being able to grip anything (still having that problem), and my back on fire. Greg got after me, saying something like, “it’s not a race. You don’t have to get it all done RIGHT now”, but the problem is is that it felt like I did. Here’s where the (self-diagnosed) OCD comes in… once I start something, I feel like I have to power through to get it done. Otherwise what needs to get done is hanging over my head, and even if I’m not actually doing the work, I’m too stressed about it to actually relax, so I might as well just get it done.

The upside of being a self-driven slave driver: I finished things 2 weeks ahead of schedule! I finished all of the hard stuff the first week, and then worked on the clean up and smaller jobs this past week. I am LOVING the way everything looks. And the addition of shredded bark in the beds makes the beds look uniform, clean, and just plain good.

We ended up doing a few things that weren’t even on the list. Namely, putting tumbled pea gravel in the playground. Tuesday morning a large truck dumped 5 cubic yards of gravel onto our driveway, and after what felt like 239048 wheelbarrows full and hours of back-breaking labor later, it was complete. It will be so nice to have a dirt and weed-free area for the kids to play in now, not to mention fresh sand in the sandbox. FUN!

I wish I had a few more before pictures to show you, kind of like I tell myself I will do before EVERY SINGLE DAMN PROJECT, I didn’t take ’em. Here are a few to give you an idea of how things USED to look:

Think dirt, with some plants, and a fair amount of weeds. It’s a great yard, but definitely was lacking cohesion. While it looked OK, that’s all it ever looked. OK.