Making the Neighbors Jealous

Though our front yard still isn’t done, it is starting to look awesome. Hubby has been hard at work out here, putting in a new sprinkler system and apparently tunneling to China in the process.

In places where he was going to install new piping, Hubby dug up the old sprinkler system. And, the deeper he dug, the more he found! There were actually two old systems stuck in our front yard!

Instead of the plethora of random sprinkler heads throughout the yard, which have never quite done the job anyway, Hubby is putting in six new rotating heads for almost triple coverage in the entire yard. This whole project has been a lot of hard, manual labor for him.

I’ve either been at work or sick when he has been doing most of this. Wop wop.

You can see one of the old systems gracing our yard with its presence. And Hubby’s trenches are ready for the new piping to be installed. His only regret is that he didn’t chop up these clumps of dirt as he dug them out. With just a few days outside under our awful sun, these are now giant rock-hard clumps of pain that have to be chopped up by shovel before being put back in the trenches after all the new stuff is in.

Some of his trenches got pretty deep, too. Most of them are around a foot. He has the muscles to prove it.

There will be three heads on the front row, and three heads closer to the house. We are also adding a few drip systems to our planter boxes. Things may do better with water around here.

These trenches are ready for some piping!

And here is a view of the trench running along the front of the house. He ran the drip system pipes in this trench as well as the line for the three sprinkler heads.

A few days later, this is where we were. The entire powerhouse for the new sprinkler system was redesigned and ready for action. This little box will be completely buried with a top cover available to access what’s beneath. Hubby made all of this.

Here is the new pipe heading towards the front of the lawn. It then spread in both directions for a total of three rotating heads in this row. Because of the intense sun, we had to get this covered pretty quickly before the pipes get damaged from being exposed.

Again, the beautiful view of our neighbor’s “new” RV. Cracks me up…most of the time.

It was a slow process breaking up the dried clumps to return the dirt back into the holes after the pipes were in. You can see that he is making great progress (Hubby took these pictures).

This is one location of a future rotating sprinkler head. He will twist on the new head and then cover all of this up for protection from the sun.

This is Hubby’s new power box. He is so excited for this! And proud, as he should be. He has been researching for months how to make a better sprinkler system, and now we are getting the benefit of his diligence and patience.

On his first test run, things worked! He wanted to make sure that he could get water to these head points before installing everything and covering it up. Looks like we have system go, Houston.

Woohoo! With the heads on, this test run is a complete success. I am sure that Hubby was pretty excited at this point to have so much light at the end of his tunnel. We have been working on this front yard for over a month.

Lots of Saturday time has been spent painting a house, so we haven’t been able to do much in our own yard.

Since he knew that everything worked properly, Hubby began the arduous task of breaking up the dirt to fill in the trenches. Then he was able to lay his homemade sod on top to complete the filling process. I was personally excited for this step, as it was ugly and dangerous to have such huge holes in our yard for this long.

We are getting closer! Not done yet, but inching our way there!