Yard, Deck, Porch Posts

We have had unseasonably cool and rainy weather this year, therefore, we had to wait a while for the crew to come and level our yard (called the "final grade"). Fred, the guy who leveled our yard learned very quickly that the pile of clay laying in our yard (the dirt that was dug out of the ground to place our house on our lot) had sat long enough to get extremely hard. He tried several methods to get the dirt to break up and spread out. He even tried to convince his boss to rent a skidsteer (sp?) to do the job, but he couldn't talk his boss into it so he used the tractor he always uses, but the poor thing had to undergo a few repairs in the process. I didn't pay really close attention to how many days Fred was here, but it was long enough (on and off for two weeks) that I think N thought he was family or something. :) He was always excited to see Fred driving the tractor around our yard. He always waved at Fred as he worked and he still recognized the blue tractor when we see it around town. As soon as Fred got the yard leveled D went into full gear spreading out the see, fertilizer and hay to cover it up. It is really windy out here so D had to stake nets down over the hay in a few areas to keep it in place. The grass has come up much faster than I thought it would. I helped D with the project a little bit (when N wasn't awake). When I saw the grass starting to pop out of the ground I told D I felt like a proud Mama who had a million new little babies. (See before and after pictures below.)

Not only has D been planting grass, but he has also been working on our deck. (Pictured below). It has been so nice to have this space because it's an area where N and I can play outside while we wait for the yard to grow.

Our builder's carpenter (Dave) came over today and installed our porch column accents. They turned out really nice. I'm so glad we decided to have them added. We've seen a few houses in the area with column accents like these so we thought our builder would be able to buy them fairly easily and have them installed in no time. Well, after talking to our builder about it (and receiving one pair we didn't care for) we found out that this style has to be specially made. Once again, we learned that we have expensive taste...Our builder was persistent and found someone to make them for us and they turned out great.