We are done, at least for this year.

For the first couple of months this spring this is what our yard looked like. We were full of water. Poor Steve spent weeks digging a trench to try and drain all the water, he even ran a big pipe at the base of the dam all the way through the yard to the other end of the fence to try and dry us out.

His next plan after getting all the water drained was to pull down some of the side hill and fill in the low spot and level out the yard. Our wonderful neighbor Tom is very generous and told us that we could use his back- hoe anytime. The only problem was this summer Tom and his back- hoe were not at his cabin. We were getting ready to call and have someone come do the work for us. By some miracle Steve ran into Tom's dad and discovered they were bringing up the back-hoe that day and wouldn't be using it for a couple of days so it was free for us to use.

Steve is pretty amazing and leveled it out pretty good. The only problem is every square inch of earth up there is full of rocks. So after he leveled it all out, we spent weeks raking up and getting rid of rocks.

This is what my socks would look like at the end of the day. I also have the habit of wiping my face with my gloves when I sweat so my face looked about that dirty also. I didn't let Steve take a picture.

We had the problem of what to do with all those rocks and we also needed to secure the hillside so I thought of stacking the rocks up to build a wall. We had to make a four-wheeler road and used rocks to section that off. Up above the lower rock wall is the road for the four-wheelers. I am not finished with the wall, but the other half will happen next year when I recover from all this work. We will cut back the hill all even and terrace another rock wall up to the top. I wanted to plant some plants in the lower terrace but the fill is all rocks so I am thinking that will be a rock garden and the grandkids and Taylor can put their cool rocks in it.

I'm excited that our lawn about doubled with this and hopefully next week I will see evidence of new grass.

It is amazing everything we have done with rocks up there. We had to go looking for some big rocks to be our base and it's amazing that within 1/4 mile of the cabin we have four very different kinds of rocks. Hopefully it will all blend together and look great.