Before I explain where I’m headed with the backyard project, I’ll tell the story of what I originally wanted, and how I got where I am today.
My concept for the house renovation was to develop a space that was able to host small gatherings and large-scale parties, both indoors and outdoors. I wanted an open floor plan for the first floor of the house with plenty of standing and seating room, built-in audio and visual equipment, and a highly functional kitchen.
I wanted essentially the same thing for the backyard. It needed to be spacious, have cooking facilities, plenty of room to recreate and entertain, and audio and visual capabilities. I also wanted a space for a vegetable and herb garden.
By the end of 2019, I accomplished the indoor goals despite Niki Sinclair’s incompetence. The kitchen she built looks like a drunken 7th grader tried to assemble IKEA furniture using a machete and a cigarette lighter without reading the instructions. But the appliances are all high-end and there is enough space to work with, so it functions well enough. Since I fired her and moved in, I’ve spent my time furnishing the space to make it more inviting to guests. I’ve been able to host plenty of gatherings.
But the backyard was a depressing mess when I moved in. The mason left a mess behind after the foundation construction was completed. It was littered with piles of dirt and rock. Weeds and trees were growing uncontrollably. There was an oak tree two doors down with branches so low that I could reach up and touch them while standing in the yard. Those branches blocked out most of the sunlight.
That all wouldn’t have been so bad had my original plan worked out. The construction was supposed to take a year, during which time I would float both the mortgage on my Hoboken condo that I was living in, and the mortgage I used to buy the house and fund the construction. I would then move into the house and sell the Hoboken condo. I estimated that the profits from my condo would leave me with a large enough nut to start the backyard project right away.
Well, that didn’t happen. I floated both mortgages for four years, not one. I had to do so much additional borrowing that when I finally sold the condo, I didn’t turn a profit. After all that, I was broke and couldn’t afford to move forward with the yard renovation.
All I could do was stare at the yard and say, “this sucks”. I focused on getting myself settled in the house and refinancing the construction loan into a traditional mortgage.
The “Temporary” Solution
Headed into 2020, a series of unplanned events helped me piece together a slightly functioning yard. First off, the pandemic kept me at home with not much to do. I started to wander outside and think that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to weed the yard and clean up the construction debris. I got started on that with a pair of gloves, some basic gardening tools, and a box of contractor bags.
Once I got through all the layers of debris, I looked at the trees on my property and thought they wouldn’t be so daunting to remove. So, I bought my first chainsaw and got to work!
I sort of read the safety instructions and watched a quick video on YouTube and started to cut down the trees. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be and I was able to cut up all the branches and stuff them into contractor bags.
That left me with the stumps. For whatever reason, I recalled a story a friend told me in college about his father teaching him how to take tree stumps out by digging around the tree and cutting the roots out until the stump can be removed.
Having nothing to lose, I gave it a shot. I dug a hole around both tree stumps and cut the roots one at a time until I was able to shove the stumps out of the ground. That left me with two rather sizeable holes where the stumps were.
I still had the mounds of dirt closer to the house that the mason left behind. I had a shovel and a bucket, so I filled the bucket with dirt from the mounds, walked it over to one of the holes and emptied it. I repeated that process until the holes were roughly filled in. I had used enough of the dirt from the mounds that I had effectively leveled the yard. Well, not leveled very nicely, but it was much better than it was. I used a metal rake to smooth it all out as best as I could.
Around that same time, my neighbor (the one who owns the house between mine and the one with the unruly trees) decided that she did not like those huge branches in her yard, either. She was having a hard time growing grass and flowers because of the lack of sunlight. She hired a tree removal company to remove the three lowest branches and I agreed to split the cost with her. That made a huge difference in my yard, it was a lot brighter and more open.
I didn’t start out with a plan but suddenly I had a clean-ish space with no trees, weeds, debris. It had sunlight for a good part of the day. I called my plumber and asked him to install a hose bib in the yard. To my recollection, he had agreed to do that as part of the original construction but for some reason it went unfinished until I asked for it.
I never wanted to grow a lawn. I’m ideologically opposed to the time and expense and waste of resources it takes to maintain a well-manicured lawn. But, for lack of a better idea, and more importantly a lack of funds, I decided I would try to grow grass as a temporary measure so I could get some kind of use from the space.
I bought several bags of lawn soil, grass seed, and a spreader. I spread it all out on the lawn and watered it. Over the course of the next month, I didn’t get much growth. A friend suggested that the problem was I was trying to plant grass too late into the spring and that I should try again in the fall. Someone else told me that I needed to water it every day. So, I didn’t accomplish much at first.
On a whim, I also decided to put together a crude vegetable garden. I took a pitchfork to a small patch of dirt to loosen it up, and added some garden soil, cow manure, fertilizer, and lime and turned it all over. I bought two tomato plants and two basil plants and planted them in the ground.
The garden didn’t work out all that great. I brought cages that were too small for the tomato vines, and they overgrew them and crawled along the lawn. They were too close to the basil plants and blocked all their sunlight. I got a decent number of tomatoes, but squirrels took bites out of each one and I hardly had any usable yield.
Some good friends of mine built a planter and gave it to me as a housewarming gift. They started it off with some herbs and they grew in very nicely, so I had that going for me.
By September, I had some patchy grass. I bought more lawn soil and planted more grass in the areas with no growth. This time I watered every day, and I had a lot more success. I got enough growth that I rolled into spring 2021 with a fully grown lawn.
In 2021, I expanded the garden to have enough space for four tomato vines. I put black plastic down in front of it so I could have space for some potted herbs.
The last project I took on was to put pavers down so I would have a level space for my grill. A friend of mine who has skills (I don’t) agreed to come over and help. I bought some pavers, leveling sand, paver base, edging, and a tamper and we got to work. By the end of the day, I had space for my grill.
The next two years, I tried my hand at gardening. I started my seeds indoors and every spring thought I’d be in good shape, but never got a good tomato yield. I am, however, very good at growing basil in pots for some reason.
All that time I never did all that much with the yard otherwise. I bought some cheap furniture and had some friends over once or twice, but the condition of the space was not up to the standard I wanted. At least I could grill all I wanted. I was also able to try and fail at gardening. It kept me busy. But I wanted to get back to the original plan to develop the space properly. I got started on that project in the summer of 2023 and it is now underway in April, 2024. I will pick up that story in my next post so watch this space!
The North Jersey Nonconformist 