Yard

Julio dug trenches for sprinklers by hand.  While it would have been nice to use a power trencher, our raised lot makes it very difficult to bring in anything heavy.  Often, it seems like more work to get the equipment up to our yard than it is just do do something the hard way. 

It felt ironic to us to be putting in a lawn and sprinklers, since that’s not what we’re into.  We are much bigger fans of naturescaping and putting in plants that require fewer resources.  But, since we wanted our daughter to have a place to play, we opted to put in a section of grass.  Because of Portland’s extremely dry summers, it would die without some amount of watering during the summer.  We decided to put in the sprinklers in order to be able to program for the minimal water usage possible, as opposed to our past technique of setting up a sprinkler and then forgetting that it was on.  There was one time years ago that we left one on all night!  A sprinkler system seemed like the best compromise to not use excessive water.  And, after having lived with it for a year, we can say that it really is great.  We also ran some lines for drip irrigation of some landscaping, and we highly recommend that, too.

We rototilled the entire sideyard, and it was a major ordeal.  We borrowed a tiller from some friends, but it was kind of anemic against our hard earth.  After many, many hours and some help from our friend James, we got it looking like this.  We pulled out all the timbers and rocks and gave the yard a nice, smooth grade.

The football field size cover over our back patio.  It is a fantastic thing to have in a rainy climate!

This is how our backyard looked when we bought the house. The house had been a rental for a long time, so the yard had been severely neglected. While we’re not big fans of large expanses of grass, we did want to create a decent place for our daughter to play. The terraces scattered throughout the yard didn’t make for a very good playground.