I set out with the intention on Friday afternoon of removing the gravel from where the pine trees had been, but I was distracted by some crap that was growing near the patio in one of the beds left behind by the former owners.  They seemed to plant stuff almost indiscriminately.  There are beds seemingly everywhere (and I’m finding landscape timbers in weird places, buried in the ground as well).  Since I have no patience or ability at gardening, I’ve taken an “everything must go” approach.  Grass is much simpler to deal with.

After hacking up all the crap and digging up a pretty good sized bush I ripped up the metal edging in preparation for putting down grass seed.  Then I turned my attention to the gravel.  It turns out that gravel isn’t easy to get up.  You have to take a bit of soil with it if you want to get all the gravel.  This in turn makes for heavy work.  I only got about halfway through the gravel before giving up.

Saturday morning I returned to the gravel, digging it all up and moving it to the corner of the yard, where I’m temporarily piling all the wood shavings and other debris until it can be hauled to the dump.  The pile was significantly bigger when I was done. 

I then turned my attention on an old dog house that was left by the former owners in the corner of the yard.  I yanked it out and ripped it apart.  Underneath I found some old lumber that someone had buried for some reason.  What was weird was that under the lumber they had buried bricks.  When I was done digging all that stuff up I had around 70 bricks (I was tempted at first to leave them there, but they didn’t seem conducive to effective grass growing).  For now they’re stacked up against the fence until I can figure out what to do with them.

This brought me to my final, and most daunting project: the removal of a 16 ft. by 4 ft. raised flower bed that was made of landscape timbers.  Each side was composed of 8-ft timbers laid end-to-end and it was two timbers high.  The thing was held together with those huge landscape spikes/nails, which made getting them apart something of a challenge.  After I got a couple of the timbers out (and dodged the little black snake that came out from under one at high speed) I realized that there was zero probability that I was going to be able to get them to the street by myself (not only were they too heavy, the trash company doesn’t like dealing with items over 5 ft. in length).  It was getting late by then, so I decided to wait until Sunday to bring in the chainsaw.

After a trip to Home Depot to obtain a chainsaw (and another to buy “bar and chain” oil) I finally got down to the business of reducing those damn timbers to manageable pieces.  My only mistake was forgetting ear plugs.  Afterwards I could hardly hear anything.

At this point, all that was left was the clean up.  But that wasn’t a picnic, either.  I had about 40 2 ft. long chunks of 8×8 timbers (some still crawling with annoying red ants), the remains of a dog house, metal edging, 8 or 9 bags of miscellaneous crap, and the remains of a large bush to hump down to the street.  The garbage people are going to be very busy at my place come Tuesday morning.

I have a feeling I’m going to pay for all this tomorrow.  I’ve already got an assortment of aches and pains.  And I think my nose is sunburned.  It’s pretty red right now, giving me that drunken glow.  I guess it’s good that I work from home so no one at work will think I’m drunk on the job tomorrow.