A new front lawn?
I’ve made no secret of the fact that over the last ten years or so, I’ve grown to hate lawns. The very idea of them (this is a stretch of land I’m rich enough to not need for anything productive), the absolute ecological disaster of a monoculture, I hit all the main talking points and don’t interrogate any of them.
The only reason we have grass in the back yard is to give the dog something to run on, and in my view that is productive. See? I’m not a hipocrite!
Anyway, the front yard didn’t have a lawn. It had white gravel (Granite? Quartz? No idea). When we moved in, I liked this… it seemed like less work. That, in retrospect, was an absolute load of dogs bollocks - it is significantly more work to keep it tidy than simply mowing it would be.
The only thing I hate more than weeding is using things like Glysophate, but we even tried that too. It never failed, you take your eyes off it for a couple of weeks and you’ve got a lovely crop of weeds that’ll take a couple of hours to pull.
Anyway, Sabriena got sick of this too, and put forth the idea of “this would be easier if it was just grass”. Fucken oath it would, it’d take me longer to get the mower out the gate than it would to mow that tiny patch of grass. Let’s do it.
So I priced out having a dump truck of the local loam delivered and it was cheap enough where I decided it was happening. I reasoned that we’d live with the weeds through winter, then at the very end right before spring gets here we’d rip all the rocks out, get a truckload of soil, spread some seed, and see what happens. Honestly, even if it’s full of weeds and multiple breeds of grasses and other shit, I’ll just run the lawn mower over it and at least it won’t look terrible.
So end of September rolls around, and I get cracking… for about two hours. Reader, I hack on computers for a living, and when I’m done at work I don’t even move from my desk before playing more video games. I walk the dog daily, but that’s about as strenuous as it gets. I was not cut out for digging up all those rocks.
One of the couples in the neighbourhood was walking by and graciously offered me an excuse to stop by talking, and in the process the guy said “why don’t you just call up the local earthmoving mob, it won’t be that expensive”. I figured it was probably more than I could afford and he insisted, it’ll take them two hours in a bobcat, it’ll definitely be cheaper than you’re thinking if you’re out here doing it by hand.
On the Monday morning I did, and someone came out in about 45 minutes to quote on it (how’s that for service), and yeah… by the time you factor in the cost of a load of dirt, carting away the rocks, carting away the cement wall, renting a bobcat, the fact that I don’t know how to drive a bobcat (I could learn, but I wouldn’t be doing the job in two hours), the price was cheap enough that I’d be silly not to.
Anyway, today they surprised us - they had an opening, and since I said I work from home they just turned up. No problem, I’m just surprised to see ya’ll! And they got it done, almost entirely without drama.
The one issue? For some reason, there’s a storm water drain that crosses our yard. It makes no sense why it’d be there, there are two outlets in the gutters, one for each side of the house. I verified with a hose they go where I expect them to. But for some reason, there’s this pipe which joins the two in a sort of “H” configuration, possibly for redundancy? No idea why.
Anyway, no fault of the guy doing the earth-moving, just bad luck: when they put the cement wall in, they wanted it to stay put. It’s a dividing wall, doesn’t protrude above ground level, it’s about a 100mm wide strip of cement, no biggie right? Until I realized how tremendously unfit I was, I had illusions of taking it out with a sledgehammer.
No, this fucker was 300mm deep, with re-bar and everything. It didn’t enclose the pipe, but it was close enough that moving the cement smashed the pipe up. Honestly, I’d have smashed it with the crowbar when the sledgehammer didn’t work.
So at the time of writing, we have a nice flat dirt area with seed on it, a small pile of dirt, and a rather large ditch while I wait for a plumber to come and fix it.
But it’ll be a lawn one day, and it’ll be 10 minutes a month of maintenance instead of several hours.
Update: 2024-09-16: We finally got a plumber out (I can’t legally fix a stormwater pipe in Australia, which arguably makes sense, but is still irritating with how long it took to find a plumber able and willing to do what amounts to less than an hour’s labour where the hole’s already dug), and I’ve covered up and seeded that area too. So we have a large, flat, weed-ridden patch of sand for a front yard now, but it’ll be a lawn one day.
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