The yard….. a must if you have little kids and a dog who love to play out side. Man can it really break the bank though. We decided we would do it all our self. Thankfully Adam is awesome and does almost everything but it still takes a lot of time. Our yard is on a slop lot so we knew we would have to do a retain wall to make the land more level. More on that below 🙂 We are also doing an under ground tramp. If anyone is looking into doing and under ground tramp we did the frame DIY style because being a under ground tramp frame will cost you at least $600 we paid $100 for ours. I found this guy who shows how he did his Under ground tramp. We have more legs on our tramp so we could not follow his tutorial but used his concept. With ours though we also did not wrap the metal over the wood and he does because we like the look of the wood. We screwed it about 2 inches blow the top of the wood strip. But we also lined the tramp with rocks so that on the bottom no dirt would fall in as well. Our land
Before
After
For the Retaining wall it is made of 6x6x8 Treated timber. We found the best price was at Home Depot. Not only do we love the organic look of the wood but it was the cheapest thing to do. But also was the only way for us to get the hight we needed to level out the yard. Our wall goes our entire back yard. We are doing a fire pit area so it is not just a straight wall. Our wall is about 3-3/12 fee tall. We had to do this to make our yard more level. We had such a slope in the back that you can see that was our only option. For our whole wall and material we are at about $2000 that is us doing it our self. After we put the the treated timber before we back filled we sprayed a sealer on the wood to help protect it even more then we put a black mesh that we stapled to the back to help keep the water off the wood to make it last much longer. Then Adam rented a bob cat and back filled all the dirt back to the yard. Also before we started we had an excavator come out and dig out our tramp and a line for the whole back yard for the retaining wall that cost use $600 (worth every penny!) That was the only thing that we did sub out.
once we got all our sprinklers done and the back fill put in we then put down sod. We will have plants that need to go in and tress but we are getting close. Also if you want to see how we did the deck i did a post on that as well. FIRE PIT AND DECK
