Matt Meiser
04-23-2006, 8:00 PM
I decided to post some pictures about the project I've been working on and complaining about for the past several weeks. The area next to our house is low, especially since the next door neighbors built a house this past winter. I had tried to create a drainage ditch the first spring we were in our house, but because the soil is so sandy, the ditch would just fill back in with sand. Finally I decided the only solution was to put in a drain tile from the lowest point out to the ditch. Most of the trench for the tile had to be hand dug in the wet sand. Once the tile was in and the area drained, I started filling the ditch back in. Since the area was overgrown with big bushes, I had to remove some, and we finally decided to just remove them all. The area in the pictures which is dirt more or less represents the area that was overgrown. Once I had all the bushes ripped out and piled, I had to spend hours regrading the whole area to fill the ditch and smooth everything out. I think its going to look really nice once the grass fills in (hopefully I will get it seeded tomorrow night.) It made a big difference in how our property looks and makes our yard look a lot bigger. The tree by the pole is going to go, but not until the eggs in the robin's nest it contains hatch. Based on measurements in Google Earth, the area I redid was about 0.6 acres.
If you look closely by the telephone pole, you will notice the grey conduit. During the middle of the project, Verizon came and buried my neighbors phone line which had been on the ground. it had enough slack I could move it out of my way to work before they buried it. When then buried it, they put it a couple inches under ground, following the rough terrain, piles of dirt, etc. On my last pass through the area with the box blade today, I snagged the buried cable and pulled it out of the ground and ripped it off the pole. Verizon is coming tomorrow to fix it on their dime. I can't believe they were foolish enough to bury a wire through an active work area.
The first picture is an in progress picture LOML took. You can see that the ground is pretty rough and can get a sense of how big these bushes were. The second shot shows the cleared area from the corner of our property. One nice thing is that my shop isn't as hidden from the neighbors' view which is good security-wise. The last shot is the low spot which I turned into a small collection basin. The drain for the tile is in the gravel in the center of the picture and runs out to the ditch. Before this area would contain standing water after every rain. It was just damp after heavy rain last night.
If you look closely by the telephone pole, you will notice the grey conduit. During the middle of the project, Verizon came and buried my neighbors phone line which had been on the ground. it had enough slack I could move it out of my way to work before they buried it. When then buried it, they put it a couple inches under ground, following the rough terrain, piles of dirt, etc. On my last pass through the area with the box blade today, I snagged the buried cable and pulled it out of the ground and ripped it off the pole. Verizon is coming tomorrow to fix it on their dime. I can't believe they were foolish enough to bury a wire through an active work area.
The first picture is an in progress picture LOML took. You can see that the ground is pretty rough and can get a sense of how big these bushes were. The second shot shows the cleared area from the corner of our property. One nice thing is that my shop isn't as hidden from the neighbors' view which is good security-wise. The last shot is the low spot which I turned into a small collection basin. The drain for the tile is in the gravel in the center of the picture and runs out to the ditch. Before this area would contain standing water after every rain. It was just damp after heavy rain last night.