If you move a lot of dirt, someone will get hurt.

Our backyard has been a slow moving project throughout the summer and fall, however slow moving does not mean easy. Our backyard has caused the scheduling of two separate surgeries so far (a shoulder surgery and neck surgery) both to the same individual which shall remain nameless.

As you will see, we started out with a half-above, half-below ground pool that took up almost all of our backyard. As much as we would have liked to have kept the pool, the possibility of a small yard to garden outweighed the maintenance of a pool.


With a Home Depot water pump and Mom's help, we drained the pool.




A couple days later, an army of teenagers dug out the pool. It just so happened that our neighbors were wanting a pool, so we hooked them up!


It took several days of work to get from the above picture to this one. Several shovels, a couple pic axes, and a couple fathers helped me level off the remaining dirt and slope it from right (higher) to left (lower). The red rock pile were all rocks that were in our backyard, and we are saving them to use for decoration or a path.


Next Step - 5 yards of filler dirt. I found out that I can move 5 yards of dirt from my driveway to the backyard in 4 hours. I'm not sure if you can tell by the photos, but there is about a 5 foot drop from our concrete patio area to our yard. So, in moving the dirt I built a 5 foot ramp with the first 2 yards and let gravity do its thing while wheel-barreling the rest into the yard.


See the pool in our neighbor's yard?


Back breaking work.




Next, Next Step - 8 yards of Super Soil. I found out that 3 Miller men can move 8 yards of dirt from my driveway to the backyard in 2 hours. It went so much faster with extra shovelers!


We live on a pretty decent size hill, so it was pretty important for me to get my yard higher than my neighbor so that my yard wouldn't flood when it rains. With great soil covering most of my yard, it is ready for vegetation in the spring!


I decided that it would be a good idea to plant grass seed and put down straw just five hours before the strongest windstorm in three years. The local squirrels who were preparing for winter really appreciated eating the grass seed that blew all around. Needless to say, I will probably have to reseed in the spring.

We also covered up a section of our yard for our garden. Our plan is to have the back half of our yard as our garden, and the front half as grass. My lovely bride really wanted an area in our yard for playing games. The giant 10ft X 17ft area isn't big enough for cornhole, but perhaps she will want to use it exercise by running laps in the spring.


I still have some work to do to protect the foundation of my garage. Spring's project will be to build up a support wall a couple of feet next to my garage, and after filling the space with dirt it could end up being a strawberry patch or something.


A special thanks to all of our family members who helped with this project, but please, don't send us your medical bills.