Our Front Yard Improvement Projects On Our Home Of Twenty Years
This story is about our old new house in Wekiva Hills, near Wekiva Springs State Park and the Wekiva River. When we first moved in back in 1995, our front lawn was more weeds than grass. Essentially the front yard was green in the summer, brown in the winter, and mud in between when it rained. We lived with it that way for years, nearly twenty to be exact. Ann always wanted to put in sod, but I always told her we needed to install sprinklers before sod so that it wouldn't burn up and blow away in the summer sun.
She didn't want to install sprinklers and I didn't want to waste our money on sod until we had them. As time went on, we realized that if we didn't water the yards, front, back, and side, they would turn to dirt. Mowing the lawn with the yard tractor would stir up quite the cloud of dust and I'd be covered head to toe in dirt by the time I was done mowing. I would just jump in the deep end of the pool to wash off and cool down at the same time.
For awhile I actually rigged impulse heads on a network of hoses for the back yard, and it helped keep the grass green and Ann's flower beds from dying, but it was a pain to have to roll up the hoses to mow and redeploy them when done mowing. I finally stopped when the hoses and the heads rotted from all the exposure to the sun. Ann and Nick eventually rigged some plastic pipe and hoses for a more permanent installation around back, the same thing I tried to convince her we needed to do out front.
Early May, 2014
Ann finally had enough and wanted the front of the house to look inviting, not like a bare patch of dirt. The time had come to install a sprinkler system and lay sod. I figure while I'm digging up the front yard, especially in front of the house by the hose bib, I'd look for that shutoff I knew was there... Nope. Must have dreamt it. Looks like that hose bib is the first fixture the water gets to though because that's where the supply line comes in. But no shut off valve...
And the digging begins. And the dirt piles up. And piles up. And piles up. We have an umbrella that I move around with me to shade me from the sun as it gets higher and higher in the sky. I figure out about where the heads need to be to allow the proper overlap and start to layout the PVC pipe. I also bury an auxiliary line along the drive next to the active line, just in case I ever get around to "boring" under the drive to the other side to run heads along the driveway.
With everything glued up it's time to test. No leaks! Excellent! Now to adjust the moving heads. The popups do a pretty good job along the front of the house too. Good thing too since the sod will be here tomorrow!
What a workout!
