April, 2008 | Oregon A-Team

My Summer Project – Stone Wall

If you’ve ever been to our house, as you drive down our driveway, up to our house, you’ll see a nice line of large rocks on the right, with small trees in between them. On the left, you see a pile of dirt and rocks, covered in weeds.

I (Ashton) got this crazy idea in my mind that I can create a awesome terraced planter there! So, as crazy ideas usually begin, I got right to work. =]

Whoever built our house evidently ran into a bunch of large rocks as they are distributed around the property, including on top of this ugly hill. I brought it upon myself to bring these rocks down, and line them up in a nice straight line. Mind you these rocks are 300-600 lbs each…

Here’s the first shot I took of the area. You can see the random large rocks around the top of this hill: (I have already moved two big rocks into place.)
The Project Begins

And then I moved a bunch of them down.
Rocks Move

Buddy helped me move the last one (on the right), which was at least 500lbs.
More rocks come down the hill

Here’s a close up of the progression that I went through in ~4 hours:

More to come,
-AshAnna

Wow! the sun finally came out, and the weather was nice, so Anna and I found ourselves outside a lot this weekend.

We started a bunch of projects, and finished most of them. But today was the most exciting as Anna and I made our first burn pile. Our lawn has been surrounded by two very large thickets of tall grass and weeds that we haven’t figured out what to do with… until today. We had a couple friends over helping us to fence the back half of our property, and they said, “Why don’t you burn this thicket?” uh… Okay… so without further ado, he pulls out his lighter, and lights two spots of dried grass in the thicket. I didn’t even have time to take a picture of a “before”, here’s some “during”s and “after”s:

the fire gets started
and bigger

And by the time the fire finished burning the dried plants in the thickett, it ran out of things to burn and basically completely died. (Sucks for the gophers who used to hide in it =])
then it runs out of stuff to burn

Anna and I were pretty excited about this burning thing, so Anna says, “Let’s burn this one, too!” lol This time I got a before and after.

Before:
Where the First and Second Burn is

After:
Hey look, a huge pile of rocks we didn’t know existed. “Boo Yea! More Rocks!”
And the fire comes, goes, and reveals a pile of rocks we didn't know existed.

Then I got a huge pile of dried up weeds together and lit them on fire! “Ooooh…”
wow, big fire

Enjoy!
AshAnna