Smooth
Yesterday we had a guy we know from the running club come out with his tractor to grade the land behind the house. Bill, has had his own grading business for a long time. Work has been slim with the housing slowdown so we were glad to put him to work. Bill is an older, smaller guy who looks weathered from years in the Florida sun. He still runs marathons though, I think he is in his 60’s.
Anyway he came out yesterday even though in the morning the weather was shitty with intermittent rain, heavy at times coming down. Ali thought he would bag it and say he would come another day but the rain didn’t bother him one bit. I didn’t think it would, Bill is tough. So he worked on the back yard from about 9 am to 6 pm. His tractor wasn’t much bigger than the neighbors I had used before. It had a bucket on the front and a big box blade on the back. He has the huge rear tires filled with water for added traction.
Well when I got home I could not believe the transformation. The back area that has been an up and down trenched mess was smooth. It looked fantastic. He was able to grade a gentle slope away from the house which will keep standing water from building up there (if we ever get enough rain to have standing water again) I couldn’t believe he got so much done. He didn’t smooth out the entire back yard, probably 2/3 of it but that is far enough. I will have to take some pictures of the dramatic transformation.
The grading will translate into some work for me as I need to raise the sprinkler heads that were buried which shouldn’t be a real big deal. It almost looks like we have a big beach extending off the back of the house. The next step Ali and I were throwing around was fencing in the area, possibly having the fence coming off the sides of the house and extending towards the back, how far back is not determined. A lot of it is up in the air and will be largely determined by what sort of estimates we are presented with. In an ideal scenario we would fence everything in and have a nice automatic gate on the driveway. I am sure the costs though will steer us towards a less grandiose layout.