Yard: Phase 1

Lately we've been working on the yard.

A few weeks ago, we got the yard graded. I took pictures of it, 

but really they are pretty boring unless you know what you are looking at. 

But now when it rains the water won't pool in the house,

which is always nice!

Next, we needed to dig trenches so we can put in sprinklers.

The ground here is SO hard,

in our attempts to find the main water line we needed a pick ax to even make a dent, then we would shovel out the little bit we were able to break up.

Luckily, one can rent a trencher.

So that's what we did; however, it was still pretty difficult.

So two Saturdays ago, we got the trencher.

We started out the morning, like I said before, trying to find the main water line.

We could see in the meter box where it supposedly went, and after several unsuccessful attempts, we just decided to start trenching since we only had the trencher for a limited amount of time.

As luck would have it, we found the water line in the very first trench we dug!

 Thankfully, before we started digging we called the water company to see what the process was if we needed someone to come and turn off the water. 

They told us to call and someone would be there in 15 minutes.

So after trying to turn it off ourselves, we called, and 25-30 minutes later someone show up to turn off our water.

At one point we had a 30 foot geyser because the water had eaten away at all the dirt around it.

I didn't get a picture because we were frantically trying to cover it so that we didn't get mud all over our brand new stucco.

I found all of this quite hilarious, my sweet husband... not so much.
But he was in good enough humor to let me take the pictures above.

So here's the guy turning off the water.

 And here's our friend who was kind enough to continue trenching for us while we fixed the pipe.

The broken pipe actually turned out to be a blessing.

We learned a few things:

1. Where the ground was SOAKED it was SO much easier to trench.

2. We didn't need to go as deeply as we originally thought.

3. If we soaked the ground that didn't get soaked from the pipe breaking it was a little easier.  

When the pipe broke my sweet husband was having horrible visions of us working until midnight to finish.

We actually were able to finish in time to make it to our adult session of stake conference!