About a year ago, I wrote about how I was having a pig roast and built a nice little home for the swine.  Well, I knew my wife wouldn’t allow a cinder block crib of sort in our backyard for too long so we
decided to make some changes to our yard.  Our backyard was sloped severely to the back of our property, and the previous owners had some sort of weed garden on the hill that we weren’t so crazy about.

Back in April, we found out we were getting a decent tax return, so we thought we should put it toward fixing up the backyard.  I don’t think we really knew what we were getting into, because as of October 7 (only six months later), the wall finally reached the top level.  For a while, every room in our house was covered in dust from the various trucks going from the front to the back of the house thousands of times.  And now, it has been raining for the last month, so now instead of dust in the house, our shoes are all caked in mud.

We had to go through a full engineering process, go to the city a few times for permits, get endless rounds of bids, but Paramount Landscaping finally started work the second week of August.  Below is a decent timeline of the events with the photos:

This is the shot from my office looking down on the backyard, we had a
driveway and about 15 feet of grass before the slope went down to the
bottom level where are son’s swing set is located.

From the bottom looking up, you can see just how overgrown and jungle like that hill was.  We also had some run down stairs in the middle which broke during the pig roast last year.

Here is the shot after all the plants/weeds have been cleared from the hill and the footer of the wall dug out.  we also had to remove a large amount of Honeysuckle trees from the back of the house.  You couldn’t see our neighbors house before all of this removal.

The wall finally getting started on Aug 20.  The big space behind the bricks is for the ‘geogrid‘.  I, of course, had no idea how the process would work, but was shocked how tedious the work on the geogrid has been.  A layer of fine gravel and a layer of sand had to be laid on a mesh mat every two levels of bricks for the entire height of the wall 12 feet behind the face.

Good shot of the time consuming process of laying this geogrid every two levels of brick.

The stairs have been quite the undertaking as well, this is when they were about half way up to the top of the wall.  We had some lighting put into the wall for the steps as well.

I figured I would use my son Charlie as a measuring stick.

For awhile I thought Charlie was growing more quickly than the wall.

That idea changed with this shot…

Here it is, with the wall completely up to the top on October 7.  We still have a bunch of work going on with the stairs, the lower level and the upper level, but I’ll have to put up another post in six weeks when then is all completed

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