Spring

With the onset of spring, I decided to tackle and hopefully finish a project I started last spring.  It involves taking up landscape timbers and moving them to allow for my kennel yard gates to open and close without striking the timbers.  The past winter's freezing and thawing shifted them somewhat causing the gates to strike them and bind up.  Not a good thing when you're trying to manuever dogs in and out.  So last spring I pulled the timbers up to set them back away from the gate opening.  Then it got HOT! and DRY! and those timbers set on the ground the entire summer, fall and winter.  The ground needed to be leveled before I set them back, and hand digging was out of the question.  Even the tiller couldn't budge the hard ground.  So this spring, I tackle it after a nice rain, the ground is workable, and in I jump!  Well, it has ended up being a superhumongous project!  All the landscape timbers were pulled up and put back in, LEVEL this time, and not just laying on the ground.  The landscape paper underneath, that several dogs found and decided to pull up for me, came up.  The rock was shifted to another part of the yard to act as fill, and new landscape paper is down.  The timbers I pulled up to 'move' are still not in their proper place, but the rest of the yard is just about ready for new rock.  The fence posts have vinyl sleeves on them, and they're all level now.  So by the end of this week, I should have this project, that's taken two years, DONE!