The Yard is Going. . . Going. . .

We got the call yesterday that the demolition would begin.  We woke up early and marked the trees that were to stay, using fabric strips: I wrote "Keep Me!" and "Do NOT Demolition!" on the strips.

 

By 9:00 a.m. this morning, we had four trucks, five workers and a nifty little red sod-cutting machine. 

 First they wet my crunchy grass (crunchy because of the awful heat and the two applications of chemical to kill the lawn), then in a careful path, went around it with their machine. A guy with a pitchfork loosened the sod behind the machine.  Then they packed up the machine and the guy with the hat (Bruno) and the guy with the sunglasses (Christian) took it off to the next job.

 Apparently mine is one of eleven jobs they are juggling.  The turf is cut and loosened.  Then I was gone for a few hours running errands, so now we fast forward.

 No more crunchy sod, and quite a few of the junipers on our hill have been hacked down to size.  As I drove up, the air smelled like pine.  Good-bye you nasty junipers!

 Good-bye cement patio!  In another life, I toted those slabs over from our neighbor who was redoing his driveway.  We set them in the dirt and drizzled sand mixed with cement in between.  They've done their duty for about twenty years.  I cautioned them that may find a shoebox with a small hamster buried in here.  Of course, it may have been somewhere else that we buried a small rodent.

  They are lifting the cement into the tractor, and he carries it down the hill to the dump truck.  In spite of marking the trees, two Heavenly Nandina on the side were yanked by accident.  (Sigh.)

View from the driveway.  Things are going. . . going. . . but not all the way gone.  It took 33 years to grow some of these things and they can be demolitioned in a day.  Or two.