instant grassification...

We moved into our BEAUTIFUL Springville home in December of 2005, almost 2 years ago. We have loved almost everything about our charming 106 year old home, except for our vacant yard. For our first two years of occupation, all we had was .18 acres of dirt, weeds, a chestnut tree and a maple tree.

When we bought the yard, there was a sprinkler system installed. We thought all we would have to do is stick heads on the funny pipe and plop down sod. Well...the person who designed and installed the sprinkler system was either 5 or had no common sense. So it was back to the drawing board.

We so badly wanted a yard, but ran out of time and money last year. We dedicated ourselves this year, and BARELY made it. We started to realize about mid-August that the summer was coming to a close and if we indeed wanted it to happen this year, we were going to have to enlist some serious help.

Enter Toby and Justin. Toby and Justin have been Jayson's best friends for awhile, and they are quite experienced in the landscaping arena. So we sprayed our weeds for the seventh time (seriously), tilled, and in one day, the boys created us a sprinkler system.


Every time there was a piece of heavy machinery in our yard, Jayson would yell to me "get the video camera!" To date, we've had a tractor from the Sumsion farm, a borrowed tractor with a tiller from Mapleton city, a rented bobcat, that thing in the picture above that would tear your face off, and a stump grinder. That thing above was driven by a guy who trenched out our sprinkler system in about 20 minutes. Unbelievable.


Mae got to spend a lot of time in the yard with her dad while I went to work for Jayson. She was SUCH a trooper and hardly every complained.


Here are our trenches with the sprinklers in and glued. They did this all on a Saturday, then installed the heads the following Monday and Tuesday. After that it was rake, rake, rake, and grade, grade, grade.

Here's Justin installing the sprinkler system. He worked so hard.


Here are some before sod/after sprinkler pictures.






The day our sod arrived, we found a pretty big problem in the shape of a 100 year old tree stump. We tried some different tactics, but in the end we had to rent a stump grinder. Only when we got it to our house, the battery was dead. So after trying to jump start it, we finally called in Ace and they came and fixed it. Luckily, the guy also ground out about half the stump.

Here's our sod on the truck!!!!!!!!!!!! We had to wait a week from the time we ordered it until it shipped, and we thought it would be forever, but we needed every last second of that week to prep the yard.

It was announced in the Elders quorum (the adult men) of our ward (Church congregation) that we would be laying our sod, and we had about 40 people from the neighborhood show up. We were floored to have so much help. It only took about 40 minutes to lay all the sod. It went so fast I hardly had time to take any pictures.


We even had some kids who were willing to help. It was so amazing.


I couldn't believe it! In 40 minutes, I had a lawn!


Afterwards, we promised everyone J Dawgs (maybe thats why so many people showed up?!). We all sat on the lawn and enjoyed. It was a lot of fun to relax in our yard!

Here are some after pictures. We love having a lawn and can't wait until its a little more established so we can really play on it.



Thank you to everyone who helped us in our yard. We can't thank you enough. We are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO happy to have it.