Adventures in Sod

What a catchy title! We sodded our backyard this weekend. Owning a house for two weeks and we've already learned much in the realm of home improvements (and this is only the tip of the iceburg....or iceberg?? Hmmm).

Here is a picture of our lawn before the sod--unfortunately this is the only pic. that I took, and it's not that great. The old owners used it for parking, so the back part of the lawn was mud, stone and weeds.

We found this fantastic hole in the wall place a block from our house that had "SOD and SOIL" hand-written all over the building. It could have gone either way. We decided to support the local business and try it (keeping our fingers crossed). Enter naive new-homeowners with relatively little knowledge (other than the wee bit of research I had done on the net the night before...lawn nerd). The owner was the NICEST man who knew his stuff. He immediately impressed me because he told me that we didn't need a bunch of stuff we had planned on buying/renting (like a rototiller, fertilizer and a water roller....yup, I know what that stuff is now...very impressive I know). We bought fantastic organic soil-- and beautiful looking sod.

Here came the dilemma--Friday Brett did all the grunt work of adding the organic (read animal poo) soil, leveling and raking out the rocks. It was really hard work and he did a great job. Brett was working all day Saturday, and they were closed on Sunday. We knew the time was ticking in terms of the weather getting too hot to lay the sod (don't mind my complex terminology, yup) so I decided to bit the bullet and lay it myself on Saturday.

They are heavy little suckers (each roll of sod that is) and I grunted them from the car onto the patio while singing many different varieties of Baby Beluga and different counting songs to try and keep track of how many rolls I had done. I put an extra set of clothes in the car (that were clean) to change into to hold Soph. I tried to put her down, but sadly, no. Apparently she's interested in sod too. It was now raining, so Soph was in the toy room looking out the sliding door. Long story short, I kept having to come in, change into my clean clothes (I felt like Jennifer Garner from Alias) give Sophie some lovin', then change back and do a couple more rolls...etc..etc. Very tiring process. I do NOT know how single moms do it.

Paul (our friend who we co-bought our house with) came out halfway through (thank you Paul!!!!) and basically finished it. It looks really great. Here is the after shot.

Now we've been watering it like maniacs. Brett is discovering his obsessive-compulsive side with watering equipment. So far, so good.

If all continues, we'll be able to open a lawn bowling alley very soon, cause it looks that good!