Holiday Weekend?

Most 'normal' families take a long holiday weekend and enjoy some down time and cook outs, and just generally enjoy time with family and friends. We, on the other hand, rent heavy equipment.

This time, it was a rather large backhoe that barely fit in our yard. The goal was to get rid of the old garage foundation in the rear of our yard, and trench in the utilities for the garage. But it wasn't just a backhoe, it was a truckload of gravel to backfill the trench with.

Once again, we lucked out to a long weekend of great weather. No rain and not too hot - weather you can actually work in without being drained of energy quickly. Granted, Eric did most of the playing on the backhoe. I kid you not, he had a smirky smile on his face whenever he was operating the thing. And I'll even admit, it was kid of fun to operate. But he was just like a kid with a new toy to play with.

The good news was that we got the job done, for the most part. There's a little left that Eric will hopefully knock out before they pick it up on Thursday. But we won't have use of our backyard for awhile. It's amazing how the dirt expands when you dig it out - there's not way we'll get it all recompacted to its original state. Plus, some was displaced with the gravel. But, we weren't expecting much use once the garage starts in a few weeks, anyway. I just hope we get to reseed the grass in the fall so we can have a functioning backyard next year.

In the meantime, it's like off-trail hiking to get to our back door, complete with hold you can fall in and break you ankle in. But we're one step closer, and that makes me pretty excited. It also make me excited that there's no more heavy equipment to rent. Small stuff, like a trencher, yes... but nothing else that fills out entire backyard.