At Home In The Woods

[Obed]

My experience with borders is they don't hold back the grass, and are a PITA to keep trimmed. I also go by the saying, if it can't be cut with the riding mower, it didn't need to be cut. :laughing: If you take a spade and shovel the edges back every year or two (like landscapers do), then you minimize the grass encroachment. Do it early in the spring when the ground is soft, it's real easy. If you wait till June or July, it's a lot harder. If you have straight edges on the flower beds, the FEL makes a nice edging tool.

I like your thoughts. Using my box blade like a dozer, I could easily scrape off grass along the edges of straight beds. However, I'm not sure my wife is going to have straight edges. One thing for sure, if something needs to be frequently trimmed with a string trimmer, then I'm going to think long and hard before choosing that path. I'd rather spend my time doing something productive like cutting firewood or watching a ballgame. I really like to be able to sit on my behind the whole time I'm cutting the grass.
Obed

 

[Obed]

Frank, I completely missed the grass photos until reading your post. Then, I went back and looked. I agree with you completely. Obed's grass looks wonderful. He did a great job getting it up and hopefully if will hold onto his soil.

Jim,
I understand the confusion; it's my fault. I'm behind on getting all my pictures posted. I wanted to bring you guys up-to-date so I posted some new pictures with grass but have put up some older pictures later out of order.

Another way to do a border is with native stones. You need to cover the ground beneath the stones with landscape cloth to help control grass. My long bed of iris and cannas is an example. As with any border of this type, you'll eventually get weeds.

You have a beautiful place there. You've obviously spent some time outside around the house. I hope my wife doesn't look at the pictures you posted!

Obed

 

[Obed]

Yesterday I cleaned up an area in front of the house by the two culverts. It had some residual piles of dirt and concrete debris that had been dumped/scattered during the construction and grading work. I don't intend to grass this area but plan to leave it natural. I wanted to get the dirt smoothed out now so the leaves can cover the area this fall.

The weather was just glorious with clear skies and temps between 50 F and 70 F.

I love my box blade. It is an incredibly useful tool. It does take some practice getting the hang of it. With this project I've gotten lots of practice.

In the pictures you can see new grass in the clearing up the hill where the garden will go. That area is about 1/3 acre. We seeded that area with grass 3 weeks ago.

 

[Obed]

Obed -

Wow, the place looks completely different with grass!! Really looks good!

Frank,
Thanks. We are really enjoying seeing the grass. We've made comments to some of our relatives about how we are excited about the grass and have gotten somewhat subdued responses from them. I don't think most people have any idea how depressing it can be looking at piles of red clay for over a year and a half.

As for the dirt work.....did you have a chat with the contractor? Mention to him he's undoing his work you didn't want him to in the beginning? And about breaking the drain line? Seems to me he's charging you twice for the same job, and threw in a little damaged line to boot.....perhaps some re-negotiation on his fees would be in order?

We got a bill from him and I cannot reconcile the numbers on it with our contract. I'm trying to schedule a time to see him so we can go over the numbers face-to-face. We're willing to pay him a little extra for some hassle-factor but I need him to justify his bill.

Obed

 

[Obed]

After the grading contractor lowered the parking area outside of the garage (shown here), I came home to find where he had deposited the dirt. My poor wife got to hear me vent for a few minutes. The contractor had explicit instructions regarding where ALL the extra dirt was to be placed. We had a spot down the hill in the woods and a second place up the hill in the woods. Carrying dirt to either spot would require some machine time; however, before the contractor bid the grading job, he was told where to put all the extra dirt.

When I took the picture above, I was standing about 100 feet from the end of the house. This is the area where I will stack our firewood and park my tractor. The surface had had a nice pebbly hard surface that did not get muddy when it rained. My nice surface was gone under 2 feet of dirt. In order to save time the contractor had spread 18 to 24 inches of dirt over this entire area because that spot was close and he didn't have to spend the time to carry the dirt up the hill. A few months ago he did the same thing and I cleaned off the area with my box blade and dragged the dirt up the hill. When I saw that he messed up the same area again, I pretty much lost it. There was no way I was going to clean off that area again. So the next day my wife made the skid steer operator move that dirt up the hill. After the skid steer moved the dirt, there was still residue on the ground and I had to use my box blade to clean up after them.

Unfortunately, the contractor had dumped a bunch of the dirt against our transformer and outside electrical pedestal. Because of the tight spaces, the skid steer couldn't remove the dirt by the transformer area so I spent half a day the next weekend removing the dirt myself, much of it by hand with a shovel and maddock. This picture shows the dirt I removed and placed it in our future firewood area. We instructed the contractor's workers to haul the dirt up the hill the next time they were on site.

 

[Obed]

The same day that I removed the dirt the contactor deposited at the transformer, I worked on the spot where the phone line runs into a conduit located close to the transformer. We had the top of the existing conduit covered by a yellow 5 gallon bucket. You can see the bucket surrounded by dirt. That will give you an idea how much dirt the contractor dumped by the transformer. That dirt was higher than the transformer and would have caused water to drain into the transformer if not removed.

Before we moved into the house several months ago, I had installed a conduit from the house to this spot to carry the phone line underground into the house. The phone guy ran the phone line into the conduit and put silicone caulk at the end of the phone line to keep dirt from falling into the conduit. I wasn't comfortable with the caulk solution so I decided to jimmy rig an extension to the conduit to help prevent dirt from clogging up the conduit.

So I dug out the bucket by hand that the contractor had buried with dirt. I also dug up the phone cable to the point where it was deeper in the ground. I cut a slot in the conduit with a Dremmel, slid the cable in the slot, then glued another piece of conduit to the end of the existing pipe. I sucked the pull string through the conduit extension with a wet vac. Then I put duct tape around the slot opening where the cable entered the pipe. It wasn't an elegant solution and took a lot of time to do, but I think it is better than it was.

 

[CurlyDave]

Why is this contractor still doing any work at all for you?

If he was working on my land, he would have been long gone, the first time he messed up where to put the dirt.

I would take pictures as you have done and fire him, get estimates for moving the dirt to where you told him to put it and deduct that from his bill.

Also put in a complaint to the contractor's licensing board, or whatever it is called in your state, before he has a chance to try to file a lien.

I have worked with contractors who do not follow instructions and they nearly always have an inflated opinion of the value of their substandard and not to specification work.

 

[Obed]

Why is this contractor still doing any work at all for you?

If he was working on my land, he would have been long gone, the first time he messed up where to put the dirt.

I would take pictures as you have done and fire him, get estimates for moving the dirt to where you told him to put it and deduct that from his bill.

Also put in a complaint to the contractor's licensing board, or whatever it is called in your state, before he has a chance to try to file a lien.

I have worked with contractors who do not follow instructions and they nearly always have an inflated opinion of the value of their substandard and not to specification work.

The grading contractor is done. I paid his final payment yesterday. We had a bit of a disagreement over his payment. After an extended conversation, we settled somewhere in the middle. I got signed lien releases from him, his skid steer sub, and a receipt of payment from the gravel company.

We are glad to take a break from having workers onsite for a while. We still have some more projects to do. We need to finish the back porch/deck; it is only framed at the moment. We also need to put in a stairwell to the upstairs. The porch/deck will be the next significant project. The stairwell job will come sometime after.

Obed

 

[Obed]

The topsoil that had been in the large pile was damp when the skid steer originally spread it around the yard. So we waited a few days for the dirt to dry. After the topsoil was dry, the skid steer guy came back and spread it more smoothly around the yard. He used a rock hound attachment on the skid steer to smooth out the soil and remove rocks and sticks. When I got off work, my wife and I fine tuned the grade at a couple spots that did not slope away from the house as much as I wanted.

It was scheduled to rain that evening and we wanted to get the seed and straw down before the rain. So we then worked hard and got the seed, fertilizer, lime, and straw put down as it got dark. We were able to get the entire yard finished before the rain. We got a few nice steady days of rain which did wonders for the growth of the grass.

 

[tony Cecil]

Very nice, and it always feels good when you beat the rain.....Tony ps Remember the garden for the Spring...