Thursday, June 04, 2020

Home & Personal Improvement: I'll Feel That In The Morning

Today provided plenty of exercise.

A friend has a landscape supply company and we've want to do some landscape improvements, and it's always good to buy from your friends, especially when they're pros.

He even came out to our house to check my estimates of material needed and gave some great advice. Since the grass area is marshy as heck it would take more crushed granite as its going to sink a lot.

Project #1 - extend the parking pad so it actually touches the driveway instead of a 11x9 feet of wasted space, turning it into a 2 car pad at the base of the Driveway of Doom™. This makes it easier for Abby to park. Also then to spread a layer of the crushed granite and cover up the crappy crushed concrete the driveway company used to make it the pad last year.

Project #2 - a lining of rocks along the side of the house to make it look better.

So I got a call today that the crushed granite would be arriving this afternoon, all 4.5 cubic yards of it.

Good thing I was working from home. I hurriedly laid down the weed should over the marshy grass between the existing parking pad and the driveway, and prepared for the arrival of the truck bearing the crushed gravel.

4.5 cubic yards turns out to be a lot of rocks. A lot of rocks. Did I mention a lot of rocks?

Just finished hauling a ton of rocks to the side of the house and spreading the rocks over the existing parking pad and creating the parking pad extension, and now I'm beat. Complete with a wicked blister on the palm of my hand, which is just great.

On the upside,the parking pad looks darn good if I say so myself.

The parking pad used to only extend to the large rock to the left level with the driver's side door in the picture, with a large strip of always wet grass before the driveway edge. Now it meets and looks good. I expect it to still settle some.

The remaining part of the pad is now covered in the crushed granite over the half-assed crushed concrete that had been put there before and looks much more appealing.

Between that and hauling rocks to the side of the house, I'm beat. Unfortunately, I still have a pile of crushed gravel left over and someone has a cunning plan to do something with it starting tomorrow.

Oh yeah, a truckload of mulch arrives this weekend.

On the upside, I've been making a habit of doing dry-fire practice drawing from concealment each night for at least 20 minutes a night. I can feel the improvement already and assuming I keep this up as a regular habit I should see better times at the range. Yes, after walking the dog tonight its down to downstairs to do some dry fire and then pass out.

2 comments:

B said...

good work gloves are your friend

Aaron said...

B: Yep that was with some decent work gloves on. Probably was a technique issue with the shovel more than anything else.