Splish splash

Sam was taking a bath!!!

Utility Box walk

For Natasha's birthday, she wanted to do the Centennial Legacy Mural Project walk. About 40 utility boxes were painted by, mostly local, artists for Edmonton's centennial. We didn't have enough energy to do the whole walk in one day so we did most of it the day before Natasha's birthday and finished the last few boxes about a week and a half later. The boxes are spread out, mostly just off Whyte Ave, between 99th St and 109th St. Below is just a small sampling of some of the pictures we took. Click on any one picture to see it in a bigger size. Some of the art is quirky, some is beautiful and some is just plain weird. But we think there is something to suit everyone's taste. Enjoy!

Pictures of the finished yard

Finally the yard is finished. The gazebo is up and everything. Here are pictures of the completed product! Isn't it beautiful?!?!?

Sam goes for a crawl

While we were working on the yard, Sam also decided to go for a crawl. Through the dirt flower bed where our landlady's mom is going to plant raspberries. Sam was an intrepid crawler, as you can see!

Laying sod

After the yard was rototilled, we needed to lay sod. We put down 60 rolls of sod, at 10 square feet each. That's a lot of sod. Natasha's dad was the main raker and sod layout designer, Dave was the carrier of the sod, and Natasha did miscellaneous things -- like working on the miscellaneous flower beds which are around the outside perimeter of the yard. You can see that the yard is really starting to come together in these pictures.

Dave shows off his dirty hands from all
the sod carrying. You can see a number
of the rolls on the ground in front of him.
In this picture you can see that Natasha
and Theresa had already spread more mulch
underneath the spruce tree.

Natasha's dad is raking the ground so
that the sod will lie flat.

Natasha's dad is raking, Natasha's mom is
working on one of the beds and Dave is
taking a short break. In the upper right corner
of the photo you can see Sam exploring.

Dave practices his sod-unrolling technique.

Dirty hands show a good day's work was done!

Sam finds a toy!

While Mommy and Daddy and Opa were laying sod (pictures to come!), Sam found something to play with. He looked pretty adorable! You know, in our not-at-all biased opinion.




Sam was also very patient about entertaining himself while everyone worked. Sam also played with the more conventional toy recycling truck which you can see in the background of these photos.

Once the yard was rototilled...

...it looked like this!



Lots of black dirt, all ready for sod. An awesome thing about doing the yard this way is that all of our non-composting food got rototilled into the soil. So now our composter is also empty. Yay!

Dave rototilling!

Here is some video of Dave rototilling for the first time. What fun!

In process

The backyard is getting closer to being finished! First to be done -- the mulch was unloaded on the driveway and it needed to be shoveled to underneath the tree. We had a big pile!

While Dave and Natasha shoveled mulch, Natasha's dad worked on the fire circle. We needed to put rocks underneath the movable fireplace so that it was safer to use. Dave and Natasha shoveled the rocks from the back of Trevor's truck, into Sam's wagon, which was then used to transport the rocks to the fire circle. Natasha's mom watched Sam and Sam played in the rocks and attempted to eat some of them!


Then we needed to spread some of the mulch underneath the tree so that we could neatly stack the big piles of wood which were in the middle of the lawn.


It looked a whole lot neater once we had done that!

Now the yard is ready to be rototilled and then we can lay sod.

The mulch arrived!!!

For the backyard transformation we are spreading at least four cubic yards of cedar mulch. Here are some pictures of the mulch being delivered. It was exciting times!

Backyard transformation

Unfortunately we don't have pictures of the backyard before the transformation started but here are some pictures of what it looked like after we had done some work.

Underneath this tree were piles and piles of wood.
We took about 2/3 of it to the dump and
the rest is being saved for firewood.

Here are the piles we moved. The near pile is brush
and the far pile is wood from an old fence. The pile of
old fence wood is 1/3 the size of what it was.
The big blue bin is full of old toys for Sam
from Kessler, our landlady's son.

Where the slight indentations in the dirt are
is where the sidewalk was. We pulled up the bricks
and will re-lay them once we lay the sod.
Pulling up the bricks took about 15 minutes total
so that was a lot quicker than we expected.