Saturday, August 30, 2008

Another Brick in the Wall

Since we bought our house four and a half years ago, we've had a running list of home improvement projects. The list keeps getting longer and we haven't quite been able to strike as many items from the list as we would have hoped. We cite having three kids in a little over four years to be our primary reason for this slow home improvement!

Despite our turtle's pace, we've really attacked some big projects this year. It's always been our hope to finish the basement, but we had structural cracks to repair and water issues to address. We had the structural cracks/foundation issues repaired this summer, and were convinced that this was the solution to our basement water woes. Not the case - water still floods into our window well in the basement (thanks to our awesome home location at the bottom of a sloping hill, where our yard becomes home to all our higher-lying neighbors' water). We have big plans to regrade the backyard in the spring.
A smaller DIY project that we knew we could do was build a retaining wall to keep water out of our carport that inevitably seeps into the basement in small, yet annoying quantities. We finished the project in 4 days/evenings and had some very helpful pint-sized laborers! The project was every small child's dream: a huge pile of dirt delivered by a dump truck, a rainstorm that turned some of that pile of dirt into a mud pit, and much shoveling, dumping, and splashing. The girls braved the heat and humidity to build our wall that we all feel pretty proud of as our family creation. Here are some photo highlights!

Ainsley checking the soil saturation levels. (A very technical project than resulted in her little body caked with mud)










Reiley clearing out the mud from the puddle in order to "rebuild the river."









The mini manual laborers enjoying a well-deserved snack.



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The finished product!

1 comment:

Krista said...

Looks good! Well done guys!