Backfill Baby

Don’t worry, for those of you sick of the pregnancy posts… this one actually has NOTHING to do with babies.  This is one of those super un-glamorous projects that was totally necessary at our house.

The previous owners had the driveway widened by adding an extra concrete pad on the north side of our driveway.  It’s a great addition size-wise because it allows some space between the cars and would allow you to park in the middle of the garage and still park a second car in the driveway.  BUT they didn’t finish out the project by backfilling and resodding the few feet of dirt between our house and our neighbors; which left a pretty sizeable drop-off ledge from the driveway.

Since we live at the end of a dead end street and are good friends with our neighbors, we actually spend a fair amount of time in our front yard and have a few kids running around, we didn’t want them (or let’s be honest, big ole pregnant me) tripping over this dropoff and hurting themselves.  And it was definitely a catch all for leaves and water runoff, so not exactly good for the aesthetics either.

We decided this weekend would be the perfect time to remedy this, so I did some research on where to buy soil and calculated how much dirt we would need to fill this little trench up.  There is a place in North Plano called Texas Pure, and it is the City of Plano’s soil/mulch recycling place.  But they will sell you various soil products for much cheaper than buying them buy the bag at a big home goods store.  So Saturday, Reese and a neighbor went to go pick up a cubic yard and a half of soil, and some sod to lay on top of it.  Apparently I way overestimated the soil we needed because we had quite a bit leftover!

And just a few short hours later, our little patch of sadness looked a whole lot better! We just dumped the dirt in, compacted it as best we could and then laid the sod down at the top.  And then watered it really well.  We did try to maintain the existing slope towards the street so that the water won’t pool anywhere, but we’ll have to monitor that as it rains more to ensure there isn’t any place getting too soggy!

We were fortunate to get it laid on a beautiful day right before it rained for two days, so the sod is getting plenty of free moisture! We need to pick up another one or two squares just to finish it off, but we were pleased to be able to check this guy off our list!

Followup: I since grabbed a couple more squares of sod to cover the rest of the dirt, so we are all ready for the rain coming in the next few days!