What a Storm!

I was outside today trying to get one of the projects on my never-ending list of projects done. I had spent some time debating between putting water seal/stain on the play structure or starting the concrete and mortar on the rock borders of the mulch beds. The play structure doesn't appear to ever had had water sealer applied, and the wood has gone all white and has those little black mold spots on it. I was contemplating trying to sand the whole thing with my belt sander and palm sander, but as I looked at it more closely, I decided that was crazy.

So I called up the local rental place. $50 for a pressure washer for four hours. It seemed like a lot of money, but compared to the suffering that would happen if I tried to sand this thing, it's a steal. I decided, however, that I wanted to pressure wash and then seal the next day, so I put that off until next Saturday.

Thus, it was concrete day. Now let me 'splain to you folks what exactly this project entails. See, way back in April, we started sprucing up the planting beds with fresh mulch. The previous owner of my house (RIP) was a landscape designer of sorts (not clear to me if he was professional or not), and the planting beds are a delightful combination of mulched areas, 1"-2" river stone areas, and plants. The Mrs., with her keen artist's eye for detail, decided to create stone borders around the mulch areas using the larger (6"-10") river rocks we had kind strewn around in the other rocks.

Naturally, anything that looks nice turns out to be a major pain-in-the-ass. That's why we all eventually eschew trophy wives after the first few wives. With respect to the matter at hand, the problem is where the stone border also borders the lawn. In my quest not to have to use the Weedwacker, I run my precious lawn tractor right up next to these guys. Then, they invariably tumble our of place on onto the lawn. If I'm lucky, they miss the blades. If not, well, I've gone through $72 in blades already this season. And I only replace the blades when they can't be sharpened anymore due to the extent of the damage.

So I got it into my mind that this could be fixed by laying down a bed of concrete and then mortaring the rocks to the concrete. I got this into my mind maybe 5 months ago, and I bought a a few bags of concrete and mortar. Then, of course, the trampoline project popped up. The concrete and mortar bags have been stacked up in the garage for months.

Today, I got out the concrete, a trenching shovel, the digging bar, the wheelbarrow, the concrete trowel, the concrete float, a 5 gal bucket, some metal shears, and a roll of 1/2" hardware cloth. I dug a trench about 4" deep by 4" wide, then filled it up about 3" deep with concrete. I added in some of the hardware cloth to act as rebar. I managed to do 17' of this before running out of concrete. I only had 220 lbs. of concrete. I measured up how much was left to go in this section of the yard, and it was 22'.

Then, I said the The Mrs., "I'm out of concrete. I could quit now, or I could go buy more."

She said, "There is something that needs you attention in the yard."

"What's that?"

"Well, the metal edging that you hit with the lawnmower - you really made a mess of it and managed to turn it practically into a knife blade."

"Oh. I can fix that. It just needs to get hit with a hammer."

It needed more than that. I smacked it around with a 12 lbs. sledge, and not much happened. I got out a polishing wheel for my drill, and it did nothing. So I called in the big guns.

I got out the Super Sawzall. I simply cut out the sharp parts. I left a gap of about 2' in the edging, but I didn't care because that's the part I always hit with the mower, at great expense to the blades.

The Mrs., however, was not convinced. She thought the cut edges might still be sharp.

And they were.

"I gotta go get a grinding wheel for the drill."

"From the garage?"

"No. I don't own one. I gotta go buy one at Ace."

"Oh."

So HannahC and I schlepped off to Ace. She loves it there, as they have free popcorn. After much perusal, I realized they had not a grinding wheel for a drill other than a pretty small one that was really almost a glorified Dremel Tool wheel.

This got me to thinking. Hmmm... There are very few tools I wish that I owned but don't more often than an angle grinder.

My new angle grinder makes a lot of sparks when it's grinding down the sharp edges of metal landscape edging.

As I was grinding down the sharp edges on the edging, a storm rolled in. I had to hustle to pack up all the concrete project stuff before the rain. It poured! We had thunder and lightning, and one was so close we wondered if it actually hit our house. It managed to take out our DSL and one of our satellite receivers, though both recovered after power cycling.

It was the kind of weather I love. Violent, yet brief.