Things We Take For Granted

We’re about one month away from the first anniversary date of when we finalized the purchase of our new built home and got the keys to move in. It seems amazing that it’s almost been a year already as I feel like I still have so much to do to finish things off in just about every room. I still have curtains that need hung, pictures to put up and decor to buy. I would say we have made a conscious effort to not try to buy everything at once and either get in debt or have buyers remorse.

One thing though that I wish we would have been able to move a little faster on is one thing we often take for granted…grass. Yes, grass. We originally had a plan to get grass planted in late spring/early summer when we still had very little weeds in the main parts of the yard as everything was still disturbed from the rough grade. Those plans fell through when we got record rainfall this spring and then all of our contacts got backed up with bigger jobs than ours.

Once we got so far into summer and it started getting really hot we made a decision to wait until fall. Fall is considered the best time to plant grass in Ohio anyway and we didn’t want to have to fight the weather with a million hoses and sprinklers trying to get grass seed to take in the summer heat.

We were originally planning to plant the grass seed ourselves. We really just needed someone who would come out, do a little sculpting in a few areas to help us with channeling water (we got to see where the water would go during the downpours in spring) and then give us a fine grade for planting. Our efforts to get in touch with people we were wanting to use for that really wasn’t working so we ended up deciding to try a landscaper to do the whole thing for us so that we A. knew it was done right and B. made it worth someone’s time to take our job.

One thing that I have been shocked with during this whole process has been lack of responses from contractors even when you are trying to spend thousands of dollars on their services. Finally we came across someone who had really good reviews who actually responded. When he came out here he said he normally doesn’t take seed jobs anymore, but he would be willing to take ours. I don’t know if he’s looking at the bigger picture as we talked about more projects in the future obviously or if he felt sorry for us that we’ve been having to live in the jungle of weeds this summer, but either way he was going to make an exception for us for which I am grateful. We got the estimate, made sure some things were clear and signed off and waited until he contacted us to start. He originally gave us an idea that he would want to do it around the week of Labor Day ideally so we knew a general idea, but no specifics. We did know that the weed kill had to sit for a week before it was safe for replanting.

So Tuesday late afternoon we learned that he was coming out on Thursday morning (which will be today by the time I post this) to start the process by killing all the weeds. We were told to try to cut as much of it as we could down to three to four inches to save on the amount of weed killer he will have to use. So we scrambled to get as much of it done on Wednesday as we could as Monday and Tuesday it rained all day and we didn’t get around to doing much mowing over the prior weekend. Our contract calls for killing the weeds, brush hogging all the area from our front tree line to our back tree line and to each side of our property line that are over grown, but the landscaper also knows we’ve been trying to cut down a portion of the weeds on a once every couple weeks kind of basis.

This is the short back yard before the tree line. Eventually this line of trees will mostly be removed and you will be able to see into the septic field area which already has grass in it. This area here also has some grass and not just weeds as you get closer to the trees because last fall when we planted the grass in the septic field we spread out a little seed that was left along the tree line and this spring some of it actually took off. This will all be weed killed though and replanted to make sure it’s all done right and with the same seed variety.

So we mowed all that we could and put up additional string lines to delineate the property lines and we should be ready to go for the weed kill today. Then there will be some sculpting, grading and finally grass planting. We are also putting in a temporary gravel path to our front door which will eventually be the base for whatever permanent path we choose to install. If all goes well we will have grass seed planted by the end of next week! The seed he is using is similar to the seed we planted last year in the septic field and by the one year anniversary date we should have actual grass! Woohoo!

Here’s a panorama from our front porch. The high weeds to the left is where we have a water pool of sorts from run off and not all of that is our land. The weeds in the middle of the yard is where there is a ditch and we can’t really get in there with a mower and all the other weeds near the tree line and to the right of the driveway are areas we never started mowing at the beginning and they quickly got out of control for us to be able to mow with a regular mower. There are even some small saplings that are trying to come up in those areas.

I cannot tell you how much I will never take grass for granted again. It has been a summer filled with a lot of indoor time for a little 7 year old boy because the weeds were either massive or we had mud all around us. I can’t wait until I can actually be surrounded by grass and we can go outside to play and burn off some energy. I’ll then have this winter to really think about landscaping. Last winter I had planned to do the same thing and we got several estimates for the landscaping around the house and some of them were either astronomical even when broken up into phases (pushing 100k) while others were more reasonable but didn’t seem to listen to what we wanted AT ALL. Why have a questionnaire asking for our preferences if you are going to totally ignore it? That plan we had to pay for, unlike all the others, only to decide there is no way we could work with a company that ignored our wishes. At that point I was just kind of done with the whole thing and didn’t want to think about it and just focused on wanting to get grass in this year.

This area beside the driveway will all have to be brush hogged.

So I’m hoping all goes well with the contract for the grass and land work as we may see what kind of plan this company can come up with or else I will be designing the whole thing myself. And while my heart and passion lives in design of many types, gardens are not my forte and I definitely did not inherit my mother’s green thumb! I’m hopeful though that we can at least get some wonderful things to grow at this house as the soil is rich and relatively untouched. At our old house, there were so many rocks in the soil to build up the foundation from being a farmers field that very few plants could thrive. I spent hundreds of dollars buying and re-buying plants in those first few years trying to establish some beautiful flowerbeds only to see most of them die off and eventually give up. Let the landscaping begin!

Thanks for reading!