Elena’s landscaping project completed

Elena always wanted to have a nice little garden of her own, since gardening is her passion. When we bought this house she finally got a chance to have the garden she wanted, after having lived in high-rise apartments mostly. Now after about six months of hard-work on the landscaping project for the backyard, it’s finally completed.

It is pretty much all her hard-work too. She had an idea of the kind of garden she wanted, and she did almost all the physical work (she’d only ask me for help when it’s something that requires two people, such as lifting/moving big objects). My other contributions are in the forms of giving her pointers on aesthetics of visual design (how to create harmony and contrast in the visual composition of the landscaping by using effective color palettes in both the plants and the building materials), helping her with research (her English is still at beginner level, and online translators are often problematic), driving her to nurseries and translating for her, asking professionals for advice and tips, finding and hauling building material home one car full at a time (900 lb. maximum capacity in our 4-door coupe), and running shopping errands when she needed certain things (on one particular day, I drove to Lowe’s five times for different things she needed while fixing an escalating problem with a leaked drip-watering system). And of course, taking pretty photos of the garden and her in it after it’s all finished.

Here are some photos of the completed garden:

Having a finished garden meant I could use it as a nice backdrop to shoot Elena in:

Here are photos of the garden before and during landscaping:

This is how the backyard looked when we first moved in. Big difference, eh?

Here you can see the work in progress. Elena got rid of the lawn and flattened the soil. She also moved the soil she removed from the lawn to the side of the garden to elevate that area and then created various borders with the bricks.

The black cloth is to prevent more weeds and grass from growing.

A layer of sand is put over the black cloth, and then paved with bricks.

Here’s one of the deliveries from Lowe’s–over a thousand bricks and dozens of bags of lava rocks. Initially, we just tried to haul materials (bricks, sand, rocks) with our 4-door coupe, which only has 900 lbs. maximum capacity, so it took many trips. Eventually we decided it’s better to just pay the delivery fee and have Lowe’s haul the stuff for us.

She used this little hand-cart to transport the bricks and rocks from the driveway to the backyard. She couldn’t load too many at once, or else it got too heavy to move.

The side of the house was all mulch, and very hard to pull the hand-cart over, so she ended up…

…paving the side with bricks, which made it a lot easier.

Elena happily putting her green thumbs to work during the landscaping:

When Elena posted about her landscaping in her blog, some people found it hard to believe she did it all on her own, and one husband of her blog reader outright refused to believe it was possible for a woman to do all that. I find it kind of funny, since we have TV shows about home improvement that features experts who are women and can do everything a man can do, including building houses, decks, remodeling kitchens, landscaping, etc, so why is it hard to believe that Elena could do it too? It’s not as if she’s physically disabled and can’t haul bricks with a hand-cart, use gardening/landscaping tools, or pave sand and bricks, etc. It took her six months, but she did it, and I’m proud of her.

The first couple of months she really just focused on typical gardening such as planting stuff she wanted in the garden, and didn’t do any landscaping. The next couple of months, she started with the lawn and loosening/flattening soil, moving soil, and dividing the sections with brick borders. The actual paving of the sand, cloth, and bricks was only during the final two weeks. (BTW, the bricks are each glued down, otherwise they’d get knocked over/loose accidentally). Here a blog entry where she showed all the various tools she used during the landscaping.

Elena was very impatient during the landscaping, because she wanted to get it done before summer really kicked in, which would make the weather quite unpleasant for working outdoors all day (it can reach above 110 °F in Placer County on the hottest days). As the result of overworking her hands, she ended up having problems and had to get Cortizone shots for her fingers and wrist and wear wrist-braces while sleeping. (I was dealing with a twenty-year old shoulder injury that acted up at the time, and had to get a Cortizone shot too, and am currently going through physical therapy.)

I tell ya, once you turn forty, your body starts to break down faster just like clock-work, and it’s kind of eerie. Neither of us are into sports or exercise, but Elena is very health-conscious when it comes to food, so we eat very well (although I sabotage her efforts by adding junk food on top of all the healthy stuff she cooks, so she definitely eats healthier than I do). I still find it hard to keep up an exercise routine, but I do my physical therapy stretches/weights religiously, since that’s an injury that I need to heal and the treatment is expensive, so I have to be vigilant about it. Elena’s hands are much better now that she’s had plenty of rest after the landscaping was finished. She still wears the wrist-braces when sleeping because she still has some pain in her fingers, but it’s much better now and getting better everyday. She should be fine without having to go to the orthopedic doctor again.