Our garage finally gets an A

For it's grading that is! Matt and I have been working on the grading project for a while now (in the midst of him finishing up a paper and my new job search) and are happy to say we've finally finished a project! (well, mostly, sort of, you know... it's really never done, but this one is at least at a good stop point). When we left off last we were putting up the painted, pressure-treated 2x12s. Here's what's happened since then:

Our neighbor Mike, got a bunch of rock

And then helped us fill the ditch we made with it.

Matt helped direct because apparently it's really hard to see where you are dumping stuff when you are driving one of these things.

Yay rock! And a big thanks to our neighbor Mike for helping us out. Whhile he was at it he also smoothed out the yard between our garage and his driveway, making it nice an level, and reseeded it so that it would grow grass.

Now, while we were really happy with the rock, Matt was worried, and I agreed, that it would be hard to mow around and eventually would get everywhere without something to hold it back. Enter black plastic landscape borders. Now, usually, we don't really like this stuff, because it seems to always turn out all wibbly and uproot, but since it's the side of the garage and we really didn't want to buy or lay stone borders, we took a chance. We opted for two 40ft rolls. The packaging suggested laying it out in the sun to warm so that it was easier to roll out, but since it was a cold day, we put it on the sun porch instead with all the windows closed and stretched it between a couple chairs.

While that was warming up, we dug the trench to put it into. We tried about 3-4 different technique and figured out that the best one was for Matt to go through with the breaker bar (not pictured but it looks like a 7 ft nail, very heavy, used for all sorts of breaking stuff as the name suggests) and for me to follow with a hand trowel. We also did a bit of re-re grading to build up some of the low spots that Mike's grading had missed (he got us 95% of the way there, but it's hard to be exact with construction equipment).

Once the trench was dug we laid down the border and then drove in the plastic spikes that hold in in place. After that, we filled in the dirt and Matt did a lot of heavy tamping to make the plastic bend to our will and into a straight line.

Next we filled in more rock since we had put the plastic farther out than we were originally thinking. Good action shot of Matt, don't you think?

And then Matt went through with a rake to make sure all the rock was level and smooth.

And Voila! Looks so much better than before!

Here's a before shot, just so you can compare: