Things in holes

Having spent the better part of the week all full of gauze, painkillers, and not a little pudding, I was raring to get cracking the past few days. So despite the fact that my face has still not regained its customary lantern-jawed majesty, I've managed to contribute to the renovation effort quite a bit.

As a matter of fact, with the exception of one small piece in the back cleanout, the drainage pipes are finished! Wooo! They would have been done completely, but we were one tiny little trip to Rona short of supplies...

On Tuesday, I spent most of the evening (what little daylight remained after work, that is) preparing the west side hole and the back yard trench for their respective pipes. This shouldn't have been that big a job, but when Mr. Drain Snaker (hee hee hee) cleaned out the clay tiles, he generated a lot of mud that had to be cleared away before I could get the new pieces in.

Here's what the back trench looked like when I finished digging out the last bits of clay drainage tile and made room for a shallow bed of gravel underneath:



Yesterday, we put in the pipes for the west side cleanout, and were quite happy when they proved to be somewhat easier than the stubborn bastards in the driveway:



Oh, and while I was around that side of the house, I snapped a picture of the corner where we decided NOT to dig down to clear out that last section of blocked drains:



You can see why we would rather avoid that, eh? That's the hole underneath the office window on the left, and the concrete base of the front porch on the right. The thick black cable (barely visible behind the camilia) is the electrical service to the garage that we laid last summer. The Ditch Witch we used to dig parts of that trench was a fun beast of a machine, I tell ya. But that's a story for another blog; one that... uh ... doesn't get updated anymore? I dunno.

Moving on.

So, tonight, I tackled the long section of the back trench and managed to get the pipes installed and the cleanout (eventually) positioned properly below the downspout:




Looks pretty cool, eh? All those cleanouts should make for a very happy crew of drain snakers the next time they come out.

Of course, Amy wasn't exactly idle. She tackled the thankless job of putting all that dirt from the hole in the front yard back where it came from (we're going to fill the rest of it, up to the level of the flowerbed, with topsoil):



That's such a tremendous relief, even though the front yard still looks like some kind of petty war zone:



So Saturday is gravel day. Yay! Joy! I look forward to posting plenty of pictures of holes half-full of gravel (I bet you can't wait!), and maybe a couple of shots of the ENORMOUS BLISTERS we'll both undoubtedly have.

Oh, and just so we're clear on this, "gravel day" involves five or six separate trips to the gravel yard (and therefore five or six loads of gravel), and a great many trips with the wheelbarrow. No delivery truck/Bobcat operator for us, no sirree!

I'm beginning to wonder if "gravel day" is going to make "concrete day" seem like a vacation...