first "real" house project

It became apparent last summer that if we want to keep gardening in our yard (and we do), that we have to expand the space. Which means removing about 200 square feet of four-inch thick concrete. We shopped around for the biggest, badest sledgehammer we could find (a twenty pounder), then got to work. Eric has done nearly all of the work so far (I tried my hand last weekend, to see what it was like. It was hard.). We don’t expect to demolish enough concrete to meet our ultimate goal in time for this growing season, so we’ve made a two-phase plan (drawing coming soon!).

The first bit of concrete wallopin’ yielded some mesh reinforcement, but after a little while, the mesh stopped, making it much easier to pull out chunks of concrete, and before long, we had a decent sized hole:






Before we started, we tested the original garden space to see if the concrete ended at the wall, or if the garden topsoil had been placed directly on the concrete slab. We thought our test indicated that the slab did stop at the retaining wall, but when Eric moved some of the bricks and soil to make sure, we found that the old garden space consisted simply of a cell filled in with topsoil:






Hoo boy. Lots more concrete to work on. The upshot of this is that a friend-of-a-friend is coincidentally in need of a mass of concrete chunks for a project at her farm. Perfect timing! Hauling the concrete out to Snohomish will be part of this weekend’s work.




Also, it seems that spring is....springing here in the PacNW (though we did see a few inches of snow last week). These crocuses were planted by some previous homeowners and had long faded by the time we ever saw the house, so they were a pleasant surpise to us!