Many of you have seen or heard about bits and pieces relating to our work outside, but this phase is finally done and it's time to share! Disclaimer: I retain the right to start another phase tomorrow if I choose. :)
Where to begin? Well, we bought the vacant lot next to us a couple months ago. We did this to a) block a local builder from building a spec house there and b) to extend our landscaping so that our house doesn't look so smooshed into the end of the cul de sac. If I could turn back time, we'd buy both lots at the same time and center the houses on them. Ahh, hindsight. When we bought the lot, the neighbors on the other side were devastated because they thought that builder [who happens to have just built one of the less attractive homes in the hood got the lot, and they had inquired about purchasing a couple times over the past few years but the developer wouldn't budge on the price. So, they somewhat hopelessly asked with a chuckle if we'd be willing to sell them half, and we said entirely seriously "yes!" We don't need the entire acre to un-smoosh our house, and in our town, you can't build on anything less than an acre, so nobody can build there now. I'm glad to split the price of builder-blocking strategy. So we tentatively agreed on the way we'd divide it for sale at a later date and worked our landscape plans based on the piece we know we'll keep!
The right side of our property, along the driveway, is lined with 5 crape myrtles that are up-lit at night. We decided to add a row on the opposite side of the lot to somewhat frame our house. The trees we ended up getting are not the same exact trees as the other side, and truth-be-told I don't 100% trust that we have what the landscaper says we have. There have been plenty of posts on the unreliable landscaper so I'll leave it at that. We decided on the Tuscarora Crape Myrtle that will likely get a little bit bigger than the original trees, but are nearly identical in color. The trees are 10-12 feet tall already, even though they're sold as 30 gallon trees. All the other 30 gallon trees in the DFW metroplex are no more than 6' tall so we're psyched we found this tree farm. It's TreeLand Nursery in Gunter, TX by the way. Great shopping experience, gorgeous trees, and amazing service. There's an excellent no-questions-asked 18 month tree warranty as well no matter the reason for its demise. Of course I'm hopeful we don't have to test out that warranty but nice to know it's there.
Here is the awesome crew planting the crapes. By the time they planted, the blooms were done, but we saw our trees in bloom at the farm and they're spectacular!
The challenge with planting such large trees, especially in Texas, is that to get a large tree established, it requires 33 gallons of water every other day until the winter months. We have 5 trees. Are you doing the math? These are planted in an otherwise undisturbed lot, meaning, there's no irrigation system. So we invested in a super high quality 200' long garden hose, but it's still a LOT of work to water these beauties. We have a system now, but a couple of the trees showed signs of distress and we realized that we were watering too fast and the water wasn't absorbing in our nasty clay soil. It was running off before it could soak in. So now we set the flow of the water from the hose at a fill rate of 160 seconds per gallon. That took a lot of trial and error, but once we found the right flow, we marked our water spigot to make it easier to set and go. That's like a mere trickle out of the hose. And we let it sit on top of the root ball for 90 minutes. We set a timer and then move the hose to the next tree. Are you doing the math again?? We start this in the morning and are done at the end of the work day. It's crazy, but it's working!!
The next part of the project is really two projects in one. Our front yard had a single large chinese pistache tree about 12 feet from the property line, upon which sat a big ugly green electric transformer. I wanted to both hide that ugly green box, and create a mulch bed to draw the eye toward the new lot and open up the appearance of how our house sits. So I did a bunch of research and decided I wanted a giant fake boulder to place over the top of it. That doesn't sound like me, does it? Not only does it not sound like me, but Brent absolutely hated the idea. We've both seen some really ugly fake rocks used in really ugly ways. Without being too specific, there's a house in our community that has some with built-in lights that we refer to as the potato chip lights. They look like giant potato chips standing upright and screaming "we don't belong" to passersby. Nonetheless, I found one I thought would be great. It's sized specifically for electrical transformers, and although it's large, my plan was to incorporate a real rock garden around it so you'd only see the top half of the faux rock anyway. I've never built a rock garden and Brent still hated the idea. Even after we picked it up and placed it over the transformer he still hated it, so I had my work cut out for me to win him over.
Here's that area, by the way with the chinese pistache tree and the electrical transformer before we added on.
At the same time I was working through the prettying up process in our front yard, Brent was worrying about a major erosion problem we were having in the back corner of our yard. The builder of the house behind us didn't grade the side yard properly, so the master community's drainage flow was disrupted and all the water flowing from the houses above was cutting through our land and washing it away. We lost about 8-10 feet of our little hill in the back. Separately, the developer is working with the builder to come back and correct the neighbor's grade so the water flows properly, but we still had to prevent further washout. So, we had 12 tons, that's 24,000 pounds of rip rap stone delivered. Here's what that 12 ton pile looked like.
The picture really distorts the view. The pile was massive, and some of those boulders were big enough to require 2 people to lift and move them. Here's a little perspective with my shoe. :)
Rip rap is new to us and unlike other stone, the name refers more to its purpose than it's origin, composition, or color. It's used primarily along shores for erosion control. Locally, rip rap is generally limestone that's broken into angular chunks. Luckily for me, it's a perfect mix of cream tones and grays which is exactly what I wanted for the rock garden, so 1 of the 12 tons was for my rock garden, and the rest was for our erosion wall in the back. The delivery was supposed to be on a friday, but we got a freak rainy day and the ground was too soft for the driver to pull on to the grass so we ended up getting the delivery on a Tuesday afternoon. We went out every night after dinner and started moving it by hand. We were done before lunchtime on Saturday so it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. While we moved the pile, I was picking some of my "favorites" and pulling them aside for the rock garden. :)
Here's the finished wall. We hope to see the neighbor's grading work start soon! Again, the picture doesn't convey the labor. The wall is about 30 feet long and 5 feet tall. The top is covered in all the stone dust and sand leftover from the delivery, and the bottom is covered in the clay from the trench dug to direct water away from the wall as it flows down the hill. Ugh, the photo is a reminder we need to sod that area too. It never ends!!!
Ok, so with the rocks all squared away in the back, we moved to the rock garden. But first things first. We had to call 811, or what was called "DigSafe" in Massachusetts for the utility service to come mark all the utilities before we started digging. They're nothing if not thorough - pretty sure you could land a plane with all these flags. :)
So the first thing we did was define a new mulch bed by digging up the grass and carefully moving it to sparse areas in the field in the hopes it would re-establish itself there. It didn't. :( Nonetheless, it had to go. Just digging down a couple inches to pull up the grass was a clear indicator that digging in that area would be unpleasant at best. The soil here (in this nook of North Texas) is insanity. Some areas are very sandy and super easy digging. In fact, our community is surrounded by horse farms because the sandy soil in the area is great for horses I'm told. However, we have like 4 different micro-types of soil in our own yard. In addition to the sandy spots, there are spots of soft red clay, hard super-glue like clay that doesn't budge with a pointy shovel and all of my weight, and yet others are a petrified mix of sand and superglue clay that results in concrete-like digging conditions which is the worst of all! This area was mostly the latter, though any given hole could contain any of the above or a combination of all 4. It's a real departure from the soil we're used to in New England.
The rock garden is just framed by a bunch of boulders laid in a circle and stacked up a couple of layers. Then we filled it with the mini pebble we screened from the bottom of the boulder delivery. There's a few inches of that gravel like rock, then a couple inches of stone dust from the delivery. Then we took fresh soil from a big pile in our neighbors yard (with their permission) that was dug up for their pool installation. We put a small layer of top soil in, then positioned the larger, prettier boulders inside the bed and added a few more inches of soil so the rocks wouldn't look like they're just sitting on top of a pile of dirt. The trick I discovered to making it natural and pretty is to alter the way they sit, and lean some but not all of them on one another. The reason for all the layers is to create better drainage. Plants that do well in rock gardens, do well because they don't require fertile soil conditions and never have wet roots because rock gardens drain really well. That's an issue with our clay soil because the water doesn't penetrate - it just sits. So far the drainage is excellent with all our layers!
I planted blue star juniper along the top layer, then purple homestead verbena through the middle. Along the front edge, I went with a new hybrid variety of phlox called Paparazzi. They look less weedy and more hearty and plant-like when not in bloom. We loved our phlox back home so I hope these do well. This variety loves the heat and is drought tolerant so we shall see. The verbena is a perennial so it'll die back soon but the phlox and blue juniper framing the top and front are evergreen so it should still look nice all the way through the winter.
We planted a horstmann dwarf blue atlas cedar to flank the left side of the rock garden and balance the chinese pistache. However, those evidently don't live and grow in Texas and should never be planted here, but we didn't get that memo. Oops - so that's why we had to drive 3 hours to Oklahoma City to buy it! It died in just a few days. The other 2 we planted elsewhere are doing great *knocks wood! Luckily, we have a new love in the Arizona 'blue ice' cypress that is native and drought tolerant and loves full Texas sun as a replacement for that front bed. Yay! We saw some fully mature trees in the next neighborhood over from us and they're stunners. Right now it's a bit gangly and see-through but as it matures, and it grows quickly I'm told, it'll look more rugged.
Anyway, here's the new mulch bed, tree, and rock garden with faux bolder sitting in place over the transformer.
As a reminder, BEFORE:
and AFTER:
The next, and last (for now) phase is adding landscape lighting! We knew we wanted to light up the 5 new crapes, and the arizona cypress. But we also regretted not adding lights the first time around to the inner corners of our house because the one light at our front door is not very impactful. So we took this opportunity and planted two petite pink crapes on the corners and are lighting those up too. The excess will flood onto the inner walls on the front of our house. As you know, nothing has been easy in working with home vendors and contractors since we moved here. The lighting was no different.
We got an estimate from the electrical company that did our original landscape lighting (and all the electrical work in our construction). We asked if we could do our own digging because anytime someone sets foot on our property they break stuff. He said he'd recommend it because the boss doesn't let them dig and the only other option is to hire a third party. He left a written bid and that was that. So we scheduled the work, and dug about 225 feet of trenches 6" deep. We didn't discuss specifics of the digging, but since all our other landscape light wiring is sitting on top of the ground and not buried at all, we figured we were going above and beyond. Well, the electrician that we scheduled didn't show up. Instead we got someone else who looked at our trenches and laughed. He said they need to be 18" deep to meet code. Through that visit, he pointed out that our current landscape lighting was not only not to code, but extremely dangerous and that he wouldn't go near this job with a ten foot pole. He said he could lose his license and the electrician who left the wires on the surface should lose his! Next steps: get builder involved to have electric company come back and fix shoddy work, and dig 18" trenches so the new electrician can add all the new lights and wire. In those discussions we learned that the supervisor wanted the original electrician who messed up to come dig everything up and start over (seems like punishment to me!) and they'd add a GFI circuit so we only needed to go down 12" instead of 18. Also, we learned that we don't have low voltage lights as we thought we did. *sigh
The gray wire is the electrical wire for one of the landscape lights. Maybe it's hard to tell, but that's just laying right on top of the irrigation hoses which are on top of the mulch. Clearly no attempt was made to bury that wire.
So, we dug all weekend, and then after work every night. At the end, hiring a third party and letting them break everything seemed like a good idea. But we got it done. We hit a PVC irrigation pipe, I sulked, and we fixed it. No biggie. And instead of sending out the yahoo who messed up the first time and the electrician who refused to work until the trenches were deeper, as was scheduled, they sent two entirely different guys to do it all. They didn't truly bring it to code either - they just tucked it into the soil anywhere it was exposed. We were really sweating a few spots in our trenches that are more like 11" rather than the 12" because of big boulders that could only take so much chiseling with a pickax. These guys would have probably done the job in our 6" trenches last week, code or no code. This is the how lovely our yard looked for weeks!
So after having our yard torn up for a few weeks, it's finally done. We covered all the trenches as soon as we could because we got much needed rain that night. We'll throw down some seed in the next couple weeks and hope for the best, but look how pretty the nightscape is!!
We're so happy the vision came together. Time to temporarily hang up the muddy boots and relax for a bit. Well, that is, after we remove all the mulch previously left on our lot and prep the land for overseeding with winter rye seed! :) Then, it's on to the next house project, whatever that may be!
This blog will pick up in intensity once we get started planning our pool and all the corresponding flair that goes along with a pool. In the meantime I'll try to keep you all posted on our other homeowner minutia. :)
Where to begin? Well, we bought the vacant lot next to us a couple months ago. We did this to a) block a local builder from building a spec house there and b) to extend our landscaping so that our house doesn't look so smooshed into the end of the cul de sac. If I could turn back time, we'd buy both lots at the same time and center the houses on them. Ahh, hindsight. When we bought the lot, the neighbors on the other side were devastated because they thought that builder [who happens to have just built one of the less attractive homes in the hood got the lot, and they had inquired about purchasing a couple times over the past few years but the developer wouldn't budge on the price. So, they somewhat hopelessly asked with a chuckle if we'd be willing to sell them half, and we said entirely seriously "yes!" We don't need the entire acre to un-smoosh our house, and in our town, you can't build on anything less than an acre, so nobody can build there now. I'm glad to split the price of builder-blocking strategy. So we tentatively agreed on the way we'd divide it for sale at a later date and worked our landscape plans based on the piece we know we'll keep!
The right side of our property, along the driveway, is lined with 5 crape myrtles that are up-lit at night. We decided to add a row on the opposite side of the lot to somewhat frame our house. The trees we ended up getting are not the same exact trees as the other side, and truth-be-told I don't 100% trust that we have what the landscaper says we have. There have been plenty of posts on the unreliable landscaper so I'll leave it at that. We decided on the Tuscarora Crape Myrtle that will likely get a little bit bigger than the original trees, but are nearly identical in color. The trees are 10-12 feet tall already, even though they're sold as 30 gallon trees. All the other 30 gallon trees in the DFW metroplex are no more than 6' tall so we're psyched we found this tree farm. It's TreeLand Nursery in Gunter, TX by the way. Great shopping experience, gorgeous trees, and amazing service. There's an excellent no-questions-asked 18 month tree warranty as well no matter the reason for its demise. Of course I'm hopeful we don't have to test out that warranty but nice to know it's there.
Here is the awesome crew planting the crapes. By the time they planted, the blooms were done, but we saw our trees in bloom at the farm and they're spectacular!
The challenge with planting such large trees, especially in Texas, is that to get a large tree established, it requires 33 gallons of water every other day until the winter months. We have 5 trees. Are you doing the math? These are planted in an otherwise undisturbed lot, meaning, there's no irrigation system. So we invested in a super high quality 200' long garden hose, but it's still a LOT of work to water these beauties. We have a system now, but a couple of the trees showed signs of distress and we realized that we were watering too fast and the water wasn't absorbing in our nasty clay soil. It was running off before it could soak in. So now we set the flow of the water from the hose at a fill rate of 160 seconds per gallon. That took a lot of trial and error, but once we found the right flow, we marked our water spigot to make it easier to set and go. That's like a mere trickle out of the hose. And we let it sit on top of the root ball for 90 minutes. We set a timer and then move the hose to the next tree. Are you doing the math again?? We start this in the morning and are done at the end of the work day. It's crazy, but it's working!!
The next part of the project is really two projects in one. Our front yard had a single large chinese pistache tree about 12 feet from the property line, upon which sat a big ugly green electric transformer. I wanted to both hide that ugly green box, and create a mulch bed to draw the eye toward the new lot and open up the appearance of how our house sits. So I did a bunch of research and decided I wanted a giant fake boulder to place over the top of it. That doesn't sound like me, does it? Not only does it not sound like me, but Brent absolutely hated the idea. We've both seen some really ugly fake rocks used in really ugly ways. Without being too specific, there's a house in our community that has some with built-in lights that we refer to as the potato chip lights. They look like giant potato chips standing upright and screaming "we don't belong" to passersby. Nonetheless, I found one I thought would be great. It's sized specifically for electrical transformers, and although it's large, my plan was to incorporate a real rock garden around it so you'd only see the top half of the faux rock anyway. I've never built a rock garden and Brent still hated the idea. Even after we picked it up and placed it over the transformer he still hated it, so I had my work cut out for me to win him over.
Here's that area, by the way with the chinese pistache tree and the electrical transformer before we added on.
 |
| The grass looks so sad in this picture. I almost feel guilty for Brent and my dad who keep the yard looking so park-like to be posting such an unflattering picture! The left of the transformer is not irrigated - that's the new lot. But the right side of the yard doesn't look burnt and yellow like this in real life!! |
At the same time I was working through the prettying up process in our front yard, Brent was worrying about a major erosion problem we were having in the back corner of our yard. The builder of the house behind us didn't grade the side yard properly, so the master community's drainage flow was disrupted and all the water flowing from the houses above was cutting through our land and washing it away. We lost about 8-10 feet of our little hill in the back. Separately, the developer is working with the builder to come back and correct the neighbor's grade so the water flows properly, but we still had to prevent further washout. So, we had 12 tons, that's 24,000 pounds of rip rap stone delivered. Here's what that 12 ton pile looked like.
The picture really distorts the view. The pile was massive, and some of those boulders were big enough to require 2 people to lift and move them. Here's a little perspective with my shoe. :)
Rip rap is new to us and unlike other stone, the name refers more to its purpose than it's origin, composition, or color. It's used primarily along shores for erosion control. Locally, rip rap is generally limestone that's broken into angular chunks. Luckily for me, it's a perfect mix of cream tones and grays which is exactly what I wanted for the rock garden, so 1 of the 12 tons was for my rock garden, and the rest was for our erosion wall in the back. The delivery was supposed to be on a friday, but we got a freak rainy day and the ground was too soft for the driver to pull on to the grass so we ended up getting the delivery on a Tuesday afternoon. We went out every night after dinner and started moving it by hand. We were done before lunchtime on Saturday so it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. While we moved the pile, I was picking some of my "favorites" and pulling them aside for the rock garden. :)
Here's the finished wall. We hope to see the neighbor's grading work start soon! Again, the picture doesn't convey the labor. The wall is about 30 feet long and 5 feet tall. The top is covered in all the stone dust and sand leftover from the delivery, and the bottom is covered in the clay from the trench dug to direct water away from the wall as it flows down the hill. Ugh, the photo is a reminder we need to sod that area too. It never ends!!!
Ok, so with the rocks all squared away in the back, we moved to the rock garden. But first things first. We had to call 811, or what was called "DigSafe" in Massachusetts for the utility service to come mark all the utilities before we started digging. They're nothing if not thorough - pretty sure you could land a plane with all these flags. :)
So the first thing we did was define a new mulch bed by digging up the grass and carefully moving it to sparse areas in the field in the hopes it would re-establish itself there. It didn't. :( Nonetheless, it had to go. Just digging down a couple inches to pull up the grass was a clear indicator that digging in that area would be unpleasant at best. The soil here (in this nook of North Texas) is insanity. Some areas are very sandy and super easy digging. In fact, our community is surrounded by horse farms because the sandy soil in the area is great for horses I'm told. However, we have like 4 different micro-types of soil in our own yard. In addition to the sandy spots, there are spots of soft red clay, hard super-glue like clay that doesn't budge with a pointy shovel and all of my weight, and yet others are a petrified mix of sand and superglue clay that results in concrete-like digging conditions which is the worst of all! This area was mostly the latter, though any given hole could contain any of the above or a combination of all 4. It's a real departure from the soil we're used to in New England.
The rock garden is just framed by a bunch of boulders laid in a circle and stacked up a couple of layers. Then we filled it with the mini pebble we screened from the bottom of the boulder delivery. There's a few inches of that gravel like rock, then a couple inches of stone dust from the delivery. Then we took fresh soil from a big pile in our neighbors yard (with their permission) that was dug up for their pool installation. We put a small layer of top soil in, then positioned the larger, prettier boulders inside the bed and added a few more inches of soil so the rocks wouldn't look like they're just sitting on top of a pile of dirt. The trick I discovered to making it natural and pretty is to alter the way they sit, and lean some but not all of them on one another. The reason for all the layers is to create better drainage. Plants that do well in rock gardens, do well because they don't require fertile soil conditions and never have wet roots because rock gardens drain really well. That's an issue with our clay soil because the water doesn't penetrate - it just sits. So far the drainage is excellent with all our layers!
I planted blue star juniper along the top layer, then purple homestead verbena through the middle. Along the front edge, I went with a new hybrid variety of phlox called Paparazzi. They look less weedy and more hearty and plant-like when not in bloom. We loved our phlox back home so I hope these do well. This variety loves the heat and is drought tolerant so we shall see. The verbena is a perennial so it'll die back soon but the phlox and blue juniper framing the top and front are evergreen so it should still look nice all the way through the winter.
We planted a horstmann dwarf blue atlas cedar to flank the left side of the rock garden and balance the chinese pistache. However, those evidently don't live and grow in Texas and should never be planted here, but we didn't get that memo. Oops - so that's why we had to drive 3 hours to Oklahoma City to buy it! It died in just a few days. The other 2 we planted elsewhere are doing great *knocks wood! Luckily, we have a new love in the Arizona 'blue ice' cypress that is native and drought tolerant and loves full Texas sun as a replacement for that front bed. Yay! We saw some fully mature trees in the next neighborhood over from us and they're stunners. Right now it's a bit gangly and see-through but as it matures, and it grows quickly I'm told, it'll look more rugged.
Anyway, here's the new mulch bed, tree, and rock garden with faux bolder sitting in place over the transformer.
As a reminder, BEFORE:
and AFTER:
  |
The next, and last (for now) phase is adding landscape lighting! We knew we wanted to light up the 5 new crapes, and the arizona cypress. But we also regretted not adding lights the first time around to the inner corners of our house because the one light at our front door is not very impactful. So we took this opportunity and planted two petite pink crapes on the corners and are lighting those up too. The excess will flood onto the inner walls on the front of our house. As you know, nothing has been easy in working with home vendors and contractors since we moved here. The lighting was no different.
We got an estimate from the electrical company that did our original landscape lighting (and all the electrical work in our construction). We asked if we could do our own digging because anytime someone sets foot on our property they break stuff. He said he'd recommend it because the boss doesn't let them dig and the only other option is to hire a third party. He left a written bid and that was that. So we scheduled the work, and dug about 225 feet of trenches 6" deep. We didn't discuss specifics of the digging, but since all our other landscape light wiring is sitting on top of the ground and not buried at all, we figured we were going above and beyond. Well, the electrician that we scheduled didn't show up. Instead we got someone else who looked at our trenches and laughed. He said they need to be 18" deep to meet code. Through that visit, he pointed out that our current landscape lighting was not only not to code, but extremely dangerous and that he wouldn't go near this job with a ten foot pole. He said he could lose his license and the electrician who left the wires on the surface should lose his! Next steps: get builder involved to have electric company come back and fix shoddy work, and dig 18" trenches so the new electrician can add all the new lights and wire. In those discussions we learned that the supervisor wanted the original electrician who messed up to come dig everything up and start over (seems like punishment to me!) and they'd add a GFI circuit so we only needed to go down 12" instead of 18. Also, we learned that we don't have low voltage lights as we thought we did. *sigh
The gray wire is the electrical wire for one of the landscape lights. Maybe it's hard to tell, but that's just laying right on top of the irrigation hoses which are on top of the mulch. Clearly no attempt was made to bury that wire.
So, we dug all weekend, and then after work every night. At the end, hiring a third party and letting them break everything seemed like a good idea. But we got it done. We hit a PVC irrigation pipe, I sulked, and we fixed it. No biggie. And instead of sending out the yahoo who messed up the first time and the electrician who refused to work until the trenches were deeper, as was scheduled, they sent two entirely different guys to do it all. They didn't truly bring it to code either - they just tucked it into the soil anywhere it was exposed. We were really sweating a few spots in our trenches that are more like 11" rather than the 12" because of big boulders that could only take so much chiseling with a pickax. These guys would have probably done the job in our 6" trenches last week, code or no code. This is the how lovely our yard looked for weeks!
So after having our yard torn up for a few weeks, it's finally done. We covered all the trenches as soon as we could because we got much needed rain that night. We'll throw down some seed in the next couple weeks and hope for the best, but look how pretty the nightscape is!!
We're so happy the vision came together. Time to temporarily hang up the muddy boots and relax for a bit. Well, that is, after we remove all the mulch previously left on our lot and prep the land for overseeding with winter rye seed! :) Then, it's on to the next house project, whatever that may be!
This blog will pick up in intensity once we get started planning our pool and all the corresponding flair that goes along with a pool. In the meantime I'll try to keep you all posted on our other homeowner minutia. :)
Comments
Post a Comment