Today I made good progress on the soakage trench. While not finished, I would consider that a milestone was reached today when I completed the pipe side fill with concrete shards, mortar and brick fragments...and filled in with gravel. Then I was able to cover the rocks and pipe with landscape fabric and shovel back in clay dirt I had removed at ( Read more... )

One of the things I discovered while raking the back lawn was that when I weed whacked earlier there was a lot of long grass which was laying down, thus escaping the whacker ( Read more... )

I am really uneasy. Since the code enforcement guy came to look at the new driveway on Tuesday I have not heard one peep from the contractor and the permit online shows no update ( Read more... )

The weather in Portland to-day was excellent...and probably won't be like this until, maybe, Saturday...so I traded my commute time to-day, worked from home, then made progress on the side yard ( Read more... )

To-day I used most of the bricks from the pathway which I removed to make way for the driveway. They were put on the serpentine between the tetherball court and the window well ( Read more... )

* I received confirmation by email that the pavers to be used for the driveway will be the permeable pavers, which I requested. It was not clear in the contract. In the end, my guess is they will mess it up but it will still work. I would like to be pleasantly surprised ( Read more... )

To-day ( Read more... )

This weekend the weather has been mostly dry, so I have tried to get outside and move some dirt ( Read more... )

On my last vacation day (again, perfect weather), Marisa and I brought her car to the shop. They fixed the noise problem, a result of not quite correctly fixing the brake they did a week ago. No charge. They're okay ( Read more... )

Just read back on our efforts in landscaping. Our work began after comments made by some potential partners in house renovation. They said it would be good to start our work from the outside and work in. So we did ( Read more... )