So, the past three weekends have been spent camping at my parents house.  I have been helping them to slowly take back their property from the hands of Mother Nature, and return their yard to the beauty that it once was.  Thankfully, my parents are letting me borrow use their camper to sleep in while I’m over there for the weekend.  It’s hot and stuffy in it during the day, but at least it has a bed.

So far we have been slowly making a small dent in wilderness that is now their back yard.  This particular weekend has been spent leveling out the backyard and placing down bricks.

When the ‘lovely’ contractors built my parents pole barn, adding in a new sewer/septic system and plumbing as well, they failed to put all of the top soil BACK on top of the septic/drain field.  Instead, they covered it with a big sandy mess of bottom soil, and left a few huge hills of top soil surrounding the yard!

Now..  Since these ‘lovely’ contractors decided to take a YEAR to build my parents barn (while my parents were in Virginia waiting to retire from the military, and while they were building countless other barns and putting my parents barn on the back burner), that top soil is now covered in weeds and small trees.  Not to mention filled with glass and large rocks.  These big mounds of dirt are what we now have to dig up, dig out, and lay out by hand.  Sounds fun right? 😒

This weekend, we started to tackled the ever growing ‘weed mound’ and attempted to flatten the ‘hills’ all around the back yard.

My parents had decided that instead of flattening out the entire yard by hand, they would do it in smaller batches.  So we added a cute little brick-wall border, like the ones we used to see all over in Germany (and Ireland, and England..) and got to work filling it in with dirt.

It isn’t completely done yet, and believe it or not, the top of those bricks are even with the cement slab of their back porch!  (Yeah, that’s how much top soil those dummies didn’t put back on the yard!)  All that is left to do with that little section is to add the dirt so that it is level with the back porch, and add some grass seed!  Wala, a not-so-quick extension to the back porch!

My father and I went and picked up 50 bricks for the wall, and 30 the day before for another project!  My brother was called over to help unload them from the bed of the truck.  It took a while, and we were soaked in sweat and dead tired by the end of it, but it was all worth it to see that brick wall.  (Talk about an arm workout!)

Another project we were working on this weekend was that we needed to do something about the septic hole in the ground..  You know, the little plastic lid that sticks out of the ground that can’t be covered with dirt ‘just in-case’ you need to empty your septic or fix it for any reason.  And where is the top of that lid you may ask?  Well, it’s about one foot under where the top of the yard is supposed to be, if they would have put the top soil back down for us.

So my parents had to come up with a way to make the yard level, while still making sure not to bury the septic lid..  Their solution..?  A wishing well!

Depending on how they plan to level their yard (which is still up in the air right now), they are still going to need a ‘few’ more layers for that wishing well.  But for right now, it is a good start.

What have YOU been up to this weekend?  Does anyone have any projects they are currently working on at the moment that they would like to share? (It’s not bragging if I ask. 😉)

As always, smile, have an amazing day, and stay cool in this summer heat (or stay warm in the winter weather, depending on where you’re at in the world)!