13 Holes

Ah, the saga of the sinking backyard may finally be over (for now). Over the 8 years that we have been living in our house, the backyard has been slowly sinking into the deep. We have deep holes as well as a general sinking of the back 1/4 of the yard near the tree line. In the past year or so we have been afraid that Nathan would fall into one of those holes and we would lose him forever. So last year about 2 weeks before Nicholas was due I called a bunch of landscapers to come and give me an estimate on how much it would take to fix the holes. I did this during my maternity leave. Of the 5 people I called, only one returned my phone call and actually came out and looked at the holes about 5 days before Nicholas. He said he would mail us a quote. Then Nicholas came and then the sickness came and before we knew it it was november and still no quote from this guy.

Fast forward to February of this year. I started again to look for some landscapers to come and fix our holes. Once again I contacted about 3 people and only one returned my phone call. He came out and looked at the holes and told us he thought it was decaying stumps. He said he couldn't do anything until the ground thaws but he would have us on his list of people. By the end of April the ground had thawed but it was raining frequently. After about 2 days of no rain, the guy comes out with his backhoe and digs into one of the holes. Low and behold the hole immediately filled back up with water. So now he tells us that he thinks there is an underground stream that is running through the back of our yard and washing away the dirt under the boulders in our backyard. To really fix the problem his estimate balloons from $1000 to $10000 and involves digging up our entire back yard and putting down a LOT of rocks and stuff to prevent the dirt from flowing away. So we step back for a little while and think about how long we want to stay in this house and how much we are willing to pay to fix these holes. We finally come to the conclusion that we don't neccessarily want to fix the problem so that it never happens again. We just want our holes filled in and our lawn graded. We would like our fix to last for a year or two and then we are out and it's someone elses problem.

On Tuesday of last week, he came back with backhoe in tow. He had bought two loads of fill and two loads of stone to fix the holes. The truck came to deliver one load of fill and then went back to get a load of stone (the thing he needs first to fill the holes). On the way back to get the stones, the truck gets into an accident with another car and the truck is TOTALLED! (At this point, I'm sure the "hole" project is cursed and will never be fixed) So now he can't do anything until he gets the stones. So we wait, while the fill company begs and borrows trucks and finally makes the delivery on Saturday morning (at 7:15 in the morning no doubt... let me tell you it's very pleasant to wake up to someone yelling outside your window... HELLO??? Anybody home? Why he didn't just knock on the door I dont' know). So our contractor showed up on Saturday late morning and started digging and filling and digging and filling. We checked out the first hole he dug. You could clearly see that there were these big boulders holding up the lawn and underneath them empty space. So deep that when he put his shovel handle down into the empty space he never reached the bottom. So the stones go in to fill up the empty space and he puts a liner down to allow the water to go through without washing away all the dirt. 13 Holes later at approximately 6PM he is finished with the filling but will need to come back to grade and seed. He told us that it was obvious that someone else had done basically the same thing to fix some places in the past. While digging he hit patches of stones and topsoil bags, etc.

Yesterday he came back to grade the whole backyard and lay down grass seed. And after a year of trying to get it fixed, we FINALLY have a flat backyard. YEAH!!!! Unfortunately until the seed takes root and starts growing we can't let Nathan play in that area... which of course is a big temptation. The saga is over.... that is until the ground starts sinking again...