Day 86 May 11

This project has definitely shed light on what poor estimators David and I are. The lesson learned here is buy more than you think you need and you can always return it :o) This lesson came about when we mixed our last bag of leveler, poured it out, and observed the small area it was covering. Boo-hoo! That was us crying.

After we soaked in our stupidity, we headed out to pick up a tiller! Yes, this has nothing to do with the kitchen renovation, but as this blog has continued for almost 3 months, it’s inevitable to include the other facets of life that take up our days. The tiller was to finally tackle space to put our garden! If you haven’t already realized, our garden should be the size of a house considering the 400+ tomato plants we started growing. I’m totally ok with killing some/a lot of them off, but David is all for “the more the better!” so alive they have stayed. So after we got the tiller, I dropped David off at home to start tearing up the grass (what he does best), while I left to pick up some more leveler. We split it up since the tiller was rented and we were only trying to pay for a half day.

 

We decided on 3 more bags of leveler, thinking it SHOULD be plenty. Teaser alert…don’t worry, it was :o) I complete my errand and returned to David tromping in dirt (it had rained most of the previous day so the ground was a little wet, but still doable). He cleared a space behind the garage where we had designated the garden. When he finished the garden patch, he then moved to our back wooded area. Last year for my birthday David got me a ton of wild flower seeds. They recommended tilling up the soil before planting, so now was our time. I showed David the spots and he went to work. After he finished up that spot, he then moved to the east side of the house where I had marked out an area to extend our landscape. Yes, it might have been excessive to create that much more landscape, but since we had the tiller we figured we’d get to all the areas we were at least considering tearing up. He was able to take out a good chunk of the grass, but we’ll have to go in by hand to remove the stuff closest to the house. The tiller was a huge help but it did stall out quite a bit. David thought it was because of our thick grass. In the future it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to kill the grass before you till it up. But considering this part was a bit of a last minute decision, we worked with what we had.

Since we finished our tilling work, we sprayed and scraped it clean, then returned it back to the shop. Once we got back home we got to work on leveling the floor again. We ended up with plenty of material, dumping maybe a quarter of the stuff in the woods. I failed to get any pictures of this process, but a few good shots would have been David stepping in the wet floors twice. I’ve concluded he’s not a very balanced person. We also used a long piece of trim that worked great for us to slide it across a large patch. Continuing to learn.

Even though it was only the early evening, that concluded out work for the day. We both cleaned up and then headed to a BBQ put on by one of David’s coworker. It was a good stopping point though because David was feeling pretty beat up after working that tiller all morning. It’s a short rest considering we’re planning of laying the rest of the floor tomorrow!!