I’m sore this morning. My back is stiff my knees are aching and I think I may have successfully developed carpel tunnel in both wrists but I feel great! Why, you might ask? Well my yard is finally filled with turf.

Friday evening our landscape architect (Dustin Halverson from Village Green) and his crew finished framing up the landscape edging and planned to complete the final grade of our lawn early Saturday morning. Our sod was scheduled to arrive on Saturday between 12 and 2pm. I hate when companies give you a window of time when something will arrive, “…yes sir your item should arrive between noon on Tuesday and 5 pm Wednesday, will someone be there to sign for it.” and inevitably they are almost always running late.

We had made plans to begin laying our sod sometime after 2pm and were going to use the morning to do our prep-work. Then around 10am I looked out the front windows to see a semi-truck from Jirik Sod Farm parked in front of our house, they were early, and we were nowhere near completing our prep-work. After getting the driver to quickly unload the sod to various parts of the lawn, Dusty finished grading the front yard while I and one of his workers focused on clearing out the circles in the driveway. By 11am we were laying sod. At first it seemed like we were flying and it was only going to be a few hours before the three of us were completed with the front yard and onto the back but that wasn’t the case. The front yard went deceptively quick as it was one open area with little to no cuts. I will admit that this was my personal assessment of the work at the time, however Dustin seemed to have a much great sense of urgency to his work, some 12 hours later I would realize why.

The sod arrives a bit early.

A daunting task.

Our early system was two people carrying (Dustin and Carson) and one rolling it out (yours truly). Our hired help left around 6 but another friend of mine and one of my very gracious neighbors chipped in for the next few hours to get us to the finish line.

Sunday morning things are looking good. I tossed down a few more rolls of sod and we were done. The dirt area to the left of the driveway will be the frame of our rain gardens which are under construction this week.

The circles in the driveway were something that both Dustin and I were really looking forward to seeing completed. I must say we were both pleased and it made all the hours of the work a little less painful.
When it comes down to it, 9 pallets of sod is a lot of turf (roughly 675 square yard to be exact). We had given Dustin a set of plans to work from that he then used to place our order for the sod. We had decided that at this time we were only going to do the front and side yard and would deal with the narrow strip of lawn that is our backyard at a later time. However, on our plans we forgot to mention to him that it not only shows our yard but also the easement area, a 5 foot swath around the entire lot. This coupled with the fact that he ordered a little extra for waste (usually resulting from cutting around landscaping and other obstacles because of the curved shapes). However in our case there was almost no waste at all since everything is based on right angles (except the driveway circles) leaving us with a bit more than we had planned. Although the extra sod meant we had to work extra hours to get it all down, it does mean that our yard is completely covered for now, and that’s a relief.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Design, Green, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.