Mrs Mallard: A week (and a day) in pictures

One of the great/awful things about new construction is the lack of a completed lawn. The unlimited possibilities a rough grade yard presents are both exhilarating and overwhelming. If you can do anything you want, where do you start? What do you do?! All those years of "I can't wait to have a yard!" finally become "We have a yard...kind of" and the time had come to bust a move.

This is the perfect time of year to get a lawn started, so last Saturday we had 12 cubic yards of topsoil delivered. Before we moved it, I outlined the area that will eventually be the lawn...

The white line represents our imaginary fence, so the goal was to get the topsoil inside the lines. Since the ground is new and will settle quite a bit over the winter, we're going to wait until Spring before we tackle a permanent fence.

12 cubic yards of topsoil

That's $322 worth of dirt.

Actually, it's a blend of screened loam and compost, so it's not just dirt.

It's designer dirt.

Pictures of this mound simply don't do it justice. It had the potential to be soul-crushing. I was determined not to be defeated, though. It took us five solid hours of motion, but, using only wheelbarrows and shovels, we moved and spread every last bit of it. It was rough work, but there was no way I was going to bail and have to get up and face it again the next morning.

We had some help...

...until the revolt.

While the dirt settled a bit, I moved to inside projects.

First up, switching the dryer door.

To put the clothes in the dryer, I had to lean over the top of the dryer door. Not a huge inconvenience, but knowing there was a solution made it more annoying.

Ta-da! It was a little more frustrating than I thought it would be, but it's done and I love it. If you're going to attempt this, I would highly recommend having a second pair of hands around for assistance and moral support.

My second pair of hands was great for the moral support, but preferred to simply point at things, rather than lift and help.

During the middle of the week I was running errands like crazy, gathering all the supplies we needed to finish the lawn. I also tried some new recipes, but that's another story for a less lawn-oriented time...

So, this weekend we put in a temporary fence...

It's a 4-foot welded wire fence with a 2"x4" mesh of galvanized wire and it's attached to 6' poles that are pounded into the ground to meet the top of the wire. It's not the prettiest thing, but it's keeping the deer and turkeys off our lawn, so that's nice. And there's a funny story about how I knocked myself out the last time I was pounding in fence posts, so I was not allowed to work on this task unsupervised. You knock yourself out one time...

Finally...

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn. I leveled the topsoil and then spread Ferti-lome winterizer, fertilizer, and grass seed--all before 9:30am. Because I'm just badass like that.

As of 2pm, it hadn't started growing yet. That hasn't stopped me from standing at the front window to gaze upon my newest work of art. It's amazing and I am so excited to see how it all turns out.

Oh, and I planted a tree this morning, too (more badass points). It's a Bauer's Dracaena and it is the inspiration for all that will come. I always thought I wanted a very traditional yard, but I was wrong. We're going funky.

In the meantime...