Something bigger - Part 1

One of the overall themes to everything we do at our house is fixing what the prior owners did poorly. This project falls squarely into that category.

At some point a few years before they sold the house, the prior owners decided they needed a place to park their RV, so they paved along the entire side of the garage.

Since the yard slopes from front to back, this required them to add dirt to level the area. Along the side of this built-up pad, they put a "retaining wall". I put that in quotes because I don't think the wall was really retaining anything. You can see the top row of blocks in the photo above. The wall was leaning outward, and some of those blocks actually fell into our neighbors' yard. I don't have any pictures that show the full wall, but it was about three feet at its highest point, in the back.

In September, 2016, we had our driveway redone. In the process, we had the concrete guys pull out all of the concrete along the garage.

The plan was to re-contour this section as close as possible back to its original slope.

Several things qualify the concrete pad as one of the stupidest things the prior owners did, but the worst was the fact that they put rickety steps in the back, which were the only access to the backyard. Think about that, there was no way to get a lawnmower from the front yard to the back without going down stairs. Did they have two lawnmowers?

the stairs

D and I started working on the project, but it was slow work, and there was a huge nest of wasps living in the wall. We used about four cans of wasp spray, and we still both got stung. We finally decided to get professional help and enlisted a friend of D's who has a business building retaining walls.

It was January before they were able to get to the project, but it was worth the wait.

They moved all of the dirt necessary to make a gradual slope to the back yard. At the same time, they rebuilt the entire wall along the side, so it was built properly, i.e., won't fall into the neighbor's yard.

In the pictures above you can see the final thing the guys did. They made a path down the middle with the last of their backfill rock. In April, I got to work and installed a path.

To be continued.