The Great Wall of Ross

The one drawback to buying a new house is that they do not come with finished yards.  The builders left us some dirt, said "Mazel Tov," and were gone.  At first, the task of putting in our own sprinkler system and grass sounded like too much work, but after shopping around, we realized that free labor was the way to go if we didn't want to sell our kidneys.  

Our first mini project in the yard was building a retaining wall, or as I now call it, 

THE GREAT WALL OF ROSS.

Our backyard backs up to a farmer's property and our land is a lot higher up than the farmer's.  The fence separating the two properties is chain link and our dirt has been gradually eroding away onto the other side of the fence, creating a lovely drop off in our backyard.  

Solution= build a 50ft long retaining wall.  

It took 315 paver stones, each weighing 22lbs, totaling 3.5 tons.  Needless to say, there was a lot of lifting, digging, blood, sweat, and a few tears shed throughout the 30 hour project.  We kept wishing Superman would come help us with our wall, but alas, he must have been busy elsewhere.    

Before

Before

Working on the wall, we were so tired and hungry.  One night after working, we both ate 6 slices of pizza.

                                

After, no more drop off!

It was a rough few days for us, and we felt like crippled people with back problems for a while, be we are so happy we did it and saved the money.

So proud of our little wall

The mastermind and the brawn of the project