The Backyard, Area C

As I mentioned in the previous post, Area C was my nemesis.  This area is right outside the Converted Porch, so we assume the previous owners wanted to create a landscaped focal point in their backyard.  We could tell that they put a lot of work into this feature and it was not easy to disassemble; but it definitely needed to be.  This area featured a fake pond, surrounded by large flat stones, lava rocks, two fountains or bird baths (they were so damaged that we couldn't be sure) and some sort of large bush that was becoming a tree. They also had electricity running to the pond area that powered some in-ground lights and possibly one of the fountains.  At one point I'm sure it was nice, but at this point in time it had become unsafe.  The fountains were broken and crumbling, the lighting was broken, the electrical wires were cracked and the bush they had planted had started to grow into a tree.


Here you can kinda see the landscaped area/water feature out of the glass door in the converted porch. You can at least make out the general area of the feature.




Here's a close-up of the plastic pond full of leaves.  You can see how the edge of the pond is being exposed by the rocks shifting out of place.  And all the weeds that are taking over.  Also in this pond were about 20 frogs and about a million mosquitos. Yuck.

In this picture you can see that we were finally able to dig out the plastic pond.  It was MUCH larger than we expected.  It was about five feet across by about three feet deep.  There were a lot of nasty leaves submerged in there.  The mosquitos were ridiculous. 

You can also see the stack of firewood in the background.  We were working on this area at about the same time we were working on Area B.  We started Area B first, but there were some days that Aaron just needed to be in there by himself cutting down trees with the chainsaw.  So I would move over to Area C with the boys to keep everyone safe.  We got a LOT of firewood out of Area B!!


Here is a shot of some of the flat rocks we removed from this area.  Once we finished digging out all of the lava rocks and the large landscaping edging stones and started flattening out the ground, we pulled about half again as many flat rocks from below the surface. 

Flat rocks

The landscaping edging stones we pulled out from around the "Water Feature"

We had about 12 boxes of Lava Rocks

I'm showing the picture below again because you can sort of see the back end of Area C after I had cut down the bush/tree.  The above picture shows the bush/tree cut down to almost a reasonable size.  I can't seem to find a true before picture of this area. 

Also in the picture above, you may have noticed the wooden post sticking out of the ground.  This post is holding the electric wires that are running underground from the shed to the pond (Area C) and then they go back underground and continue onto Area D and then into the house. Attached to the post are two outlets that we didn't dare test out!! We did have an electrician come out to the house to disconnect the electricity that was leaving the house.  We were trying to be as safe as possible, but we also didn't want to take any chances.

Below is a picture of the post that used to reside in Area D just so you can see a close-up of how this was assembled. I'm going to guess that this was not up to code...

Aaron pulling the electrical wire out of the ground.

The wire going into the ground.

A very home-made electrical situation. Not safe at all.

The electrical wire continuing onto Area D

Once we dug out the rocks we started to flatten the ground.   

I thought that we would have a big pile of dirt to haul away, but we didn't.  It all flattened out just perfectly. 

We tried to dig out that bush, but the roots are holding tight.  We'll have to grind it out with a stump grinder later this summer. But for now, it will just look like a massive grave.

This is how this area looked when we stopped working on it last fall. October 7, 2017 to be exact. 

 

And here is how it looks as of March 2018.  Grass seed is down and we're praying it takes so that we don't have anyone wondering what's buried under there.

March 2018

Next up, we'll move back over to Area D.