Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Landfills are the coolest

Seriously. I am thinking of working at one.

This weekend my parents came down and worked on our front yard. For those of you who haven't seen it, our front yard was UGLY! The previous owners must have thought that 2 different slabs of concrete, asphalt, dirt and lava rock were the perfect combination for an award winning yard. Me... not so much.

Last week I posted our lava rock on Craigslist(which, by the way, is one of the coolest sites on the web for free stuff). Some wonderful man, who must have shared the same landscaping taste as the previous owners of our house, came by while I was at work and loaded up all of our lava rock so he could... umm… beautify his own house. Yeah!!! No more lava rock for me!


Having rid the yard of the lava rock, the next task was to remove one old slab of concrete and extend the planter bed. We were expecting to have to rent a jack hammer or some other tool to get the concrete out, but nope... we had plenty of muscles for the job and quickly removed the old concrete.

Next we had to get rid of the 1.5 TONS of concrete that we had removed. We couldn't just hide it in the bottom of our trash can for the unsuspecting trash man to pick up. It was off to the first landfill of the weekend to drop off our load of concrete.

Let me just say again, I love landfills. The people there are sooo nice. As we were unloading the trailer, I snapped a few pictures. One of the workers saw me and couldn’t stop laughing at the crazy girl who was taking pictures of all the trash. Did I mention that we also got to wear a really cool neon hard hat???


We spent the rest of the weekend moving dirt, installing a drip system and planting.

On Sunday it rained. We had already planted everything so it was fun to see our new little plants getting much needed water.


Early in the day we decided that to finish off the project and tie everything together we needed some compost/ mulch. Off we went to another landfill. It never occurred to us that landfills don’t have paved roads… or that dirt roads, compost and rain mean lots and lots of mud! By the end we were covered in muddy compost, but the wonderful people at the landfill had filled our entire trailer with beautiful compost for only $8.00! Again, they were some of the happiest and nicest people I had ever met. I really think I have found my calling in life :)


Well, thanks to all the hard work from my WONFERFUL parents, my yard is now gorgeous (or at least I think so!).

Thank you Mom & Dad for all of your hard work and for keeping me company while Kenny was away flying!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like your post...I am a trash collector and you'd be surprised at how many women we meet on the route who stop to watch the truck crush (had a woman last week ask if she could press the lever on her bags and other stuff). You ever stop to watch your garbage men taking your stuff?

Jim and Jolene said...

WOW...What a straight light post!!!! :)

allison said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
allison said...

What nice parents! It looks good, I bet Kenny was surprized when he returned. Oh, and it rained in San Diego. . . .haha.

I had a mis-spelling I had to remove the first comment : )

Danny and Tonita said...

I LOVE you post, espically your enthusiam for the land fill; but mostly the neon hat! I'm jealous, I guess I'll have to visit our local landfill. :)

PS: You yard is Beautiful!