Our first major project!

Well, if you have looked at Aunt Sara's blog you will see that Andrew and I had a little project to complete starting on Monday. I will tell you now, Monday was NOT a good day. We had to finish up the sprinkler system at Sara's house and also start preparing the ground to lay the bricks for the retaining wall.  Let's just say, Andrew and I both are very head strong and somewhat bossy on how we think things should be done. I wanted to lay out the string one way and measure everything and Andrew just wanted to guess-timate and do it his own way. He ended up going to our place for about 4 hours and left me at Sara's.  I finally decided to ride Hannah's bike (I had ridden it there a few days earlier from Josh and Stacy's house) home, which is no little ride. I ended up getting there, still in a foul mood and decided to ride it back to Sara's house where we had to finish up preparing the ground. Andrew and Leah drove back to Sara's and I was determined to be in a better mood. We finished it and then went to Josh and Stacy's for a barbecue.  Right after the barbecue, Sara, Josh, Hannah, Andrew and I went to Home Depot to pick up all of the bricks to lay out. Who knew it would take so long just to get 140 bricks? Anyways to make that long story short, we all rode home, Sara in her low rider Explorer holding about 70 bricks and Josh in his uber low rider a.k.a Mexi-ride :). I laughed the whole way home. Josh was sweating bullets, fearing that his truck wouldn't make it the short distance to Sara's house.  We all made it of course and by that time it was about 9:30 so there was little sunlight. We knew what we had to do and carried everyone of those bricks to Sara's backyard. That was quite the job but as Sara said we definitely got in our workouts for the day. 

Tuesday morning Andrew and I headed back to Sara's to finish the job.  I looked up a few instructions on how to do the job correctly, by the way we were both in a better mood by now. We made the trench and hoped that it would be level enough that we didn't have to do too much adjusting.  
So we started on the first layer of bricks making sure that each brick was level and straight. It wasn't too bad but it did take quite a while. 
The last three layers went really quick. For a while Andrew was inside taking care of Leah and I was out there alone putting on the layers. I had turned on the sprinkler system so that it would spray me because it was SOO blasted HOT! It felt good to have the water spraying me except when it mixed with my sweat and dripped into my eyes. Let's just say that's almost worse than having grapefruit pulp in your eye. :) 
As you can see the final product looks GREAT. We are very proud of ourselves. We are also surprised that we had enough dirt left over to fill in the gap.  We worked very hard and are proud of our accomplishment.  We both talked about it later that night and decided that it's not worth the time to argue and get mad at each other because it's not worth it. If we both realize that the other one has something good to suggest and we both listen that things will get done a lot quicker and without the threats for divorce.  Just kidding :) Well Sara I hope you like it!