Today taught me a very valuable lesson. Some of you may be aware that I have been building a home. Well, it’s finished and we closed Friday. Yay us.
We’ve been doing a lot of project to help make the house ours before we move in. I put in a fan yesterday. It wasn’t too bad, I’ve done it before… we won’t mention that I arc welded a pair of pliers to an iron hook.
But today, I attempted a new project. I didn’t want to pay the builder nearly five grand to sod the backyard. How hard can it be?
If you are a devotee of the BBC and Top Gear, you know those words never end well. It didn’t… which brings me to today’s topic.
Making sure you have defined all the parameters and researched all the aspects of the new project. I did this… mostly. I spent a few hours researching the type of grass that was drought tolerant, full sun, and quite hardy and selected Bermuda Tif 416. The Celebration Bermuda was slightly better, but much more expensive. I ran some calculations for the back yard and estimated how much sod would be required. It came to seven and one half pallets.
The sod arrived today and I trekked out to the house to put grass all over the back yard.
Here’s where my faulty assumption comes into play. I figured that sod was basically grass with a (very) thin layer of dirt to hold it together. I was fundamentally mistaken.
Each 1.5 square feet of sod came attached to approximately 25 pounds of clay. The sod was grown in the Houston. The ‘soil’ in Houston is either clay or sand. Sometimes both. The entire northern Gulf Coast region of Texas sits on 10,000 feet of sand, clay, and silt. The vast majority of it was attached to the bottom of my grass.
Instead of dumping 20-30 square feet at a time into my wheelbarrow, I was barely fitting 6 or 7 square feet at a time.
I’d love to say that I persevered and completed the task. Bull cookies. I moved roughly two tons of sod today and my wife helped me move another two tons. We’re almost 2/3rds done.
The big problem is that I have a big presentation tomorrow and I laughingly assumed that I would have some free time tonight to work on it. Instead, I will be taking about 30 Aleve, crawling into bed and hoping that I’m capable of movement tomorrow to go to this meeting.
I’d also like to say that my life lesson was learned and this will never happen again. Those who know me realize that this is a pipe dream and I will continue to be an idiot at the most inopportune time. However, I will try.
