For the most part, the Major Landscape project is finished! We still have some more work to do, but the part of the house and landscape that shows itself to the world, street-side, is now complete.

We wanted to stop, or at least slow down, some of the water entering the basement from around some windows in the basement. We had to backfill dirt up to the house to help keep water away from the foundation. By the way, this is a good idea for anyone to do, if you haven’t done so already. Dirt is cheap, about $30 bucks a cubic yard (a full-sized pickup truck full).

The hardest part about any dirt-moving landscape job is obviously the sweat-equity involved. This whole project cost less than $200 dollars, but took several weekends of back-breaking work. It always bugged me at how quickly a front-end loader could fill the back of the pickup bed with dirt, but how long it took me to unload the dirt once we had it home!

What do you think? Does the dirt and mulch look better than the gutter pipes and weeds? I haven’t decided yet. We still need to bring the landscape blocks, dirt and mulch, around the southwest side of the house, by the back porch and kitchen, and then we’ll have the house completely surrounded in mulch and dirt, to give the house a cleaner look. We had a bunch of 30 year old evergreen bushes around the perimeter of the house, but they have gotten too big and make the house look dated: yes, the 70’s have come and GONE!

Click the picture at the top of the blog entry to see more photos from the project and click here to see the blog entry about what it took to get to the dirt and mulch end of this project.

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