REAL HOME SAGA: Amy's Lawn

Every home comes with a few unsavory features that buyers have to overlook, knowing they probably made the home more affordable and, at the very least, will make for a good story someday. But when you purchase a starter home in a “transitional” neighborhood, you get both in spades.

To say the exterior of our first home had no curb appeal wouldn’t do justice to the revulsion it could provoke just from viewing its mug shot on the auditor’s website. Sick rose of Sharon bushes dropped cigarette-looking flowers onto peeling paint, and the “lawn” resembled an abandoned lot, where grass just happened to begin growing in sad patches between gravel and weed-filled dirt.

Neighbors shared many stories about a former owner, whom I nicknamed “Bubba” for all the haphazard “improvements” he and his buddies inflicted on the home, but the tale of the front yard is one of the finest.

While the elderly couple next-door was on vacation, instead of getting a permit and hiring one of Cincinnati's many fine concrete contractors, Bubba took it upon himself to “build” a “driveway” in the narrow 10 feet that separated the homes, despite the fact that it went against building codes - and the neighbors’ wishes - and over the property line.

The owner before us – a flipper who purchased the home for dirt-cheap after it was repossessed from Bubba - did plenty of work inside the home but didn’t bother cleaning up the exterior, or the two tire strips of gravel running from the street into the side yard.

While my husband and I don’t call ourselves “do-it-yourselfers,” this project seemed simple enough: We’d take the weekend, dig out the two 2 ½-foot-wide swatches of gravel and neatly replace them with stretches of sod, then stand back and admire our new green carpet, perhaps while sipping garden-fresh cocktails on our porch.

Then we started digging.

The gravel was 4-5 inches deep, dumped over a layer of black landscaping plastic. And it never ended. No matter how many times we extended the dig site, inch by inch, to find the promised land where clean soil lived free of gravel, we were met with disappointment. Bubba and his buddies either did an expectedly messy job or just dumped the extra gravel in the front yard.

Our weekend warrior stint flowed into the workweek, and disappointment turned to desperation.

As the dig site grew, the plastic and gravel began to mix with clumps of heavy clay, common in this region, and plastic bags from Wal-Mart – Bubba’s material-du-jour when the landscaping plastic ran out.

As the project grew to encompass the entire 11-by-22-foot yard, things went from bad to worse when every other shovel-strike hit a complex of tree roots, leading to a main root roughly the size and shape of a dinosaur bone.

Removing 30 wheel barrel loads of gravel and dinosaur bones added up to another unexpected problem: a potholed surface far lower than the sidewalk. So with an affordable tiller - small enough to use later in our garden – and eight 40-pound bags of topsoil, another afternoon was spent leveling then packing down the soil. Without the appropriate equipment, we settled for our own body weight, atop a 2-by-6 board that we inched across the yard.

The final step of the back-breaking project was, ironically, simple. The sod unrolled as easy as carpet over the fresh soil. We placed the fescue mix in a snug brick pattern – to stagger the seams, ringed the area with caution tape, turned on the sprinklers and waved to a couple neighbors – who’d been watching the project with some amusement and occasional comments – before swearing off future projects and retreating indoors.

Amy Howell Hirt is Roofing Networx writer. Get home & garden ideas like this - http://www.networx.com/article/real-home-saga-amys-lawn - on Networx.