Down the Road it Goes

When we bought our house, it came complete with a kid's playhouse. The door is about four feet high. It had a little front porch, which, when combined with the tiny door made it almost impossible for me to get into, not that I wanted to. It wasn't much good for storage because of it's location and small size, so we decided it had to go. One of the guys who helped us move offered to take it off our hands and so we took him up on the offer. "Haul it away and it's yours."

Jared thought he could dismantle it and take it through the gate. However, it became obvious that to dismantle it would reduce it to a pile of lumber with a roof. Jared moved on to plan B and called in reinforcements.

A friend of a friend had a Bobcat and I said we could take down a panel of the fence to let it in. The opening in the fence was six inches wider than the playhouse, not including the roof. They had to get the roof up above the top of the fence. It almost worked. I had planned to replace some of the fence posts later this summer because they were listing several degrees out of plumb, making the gate into a parallelogram rather than a rectangle. As the playhouse went out the opening, they bashed into the posts pretty good. It was not planned, but it will make the posts easier to remove when the time comes. I just have to take on that job earlier than I planned.

I'm not too riled up about the grass being torn up either. The former owners apparently hadn't ever heard about fertilizer and it's role in strengthening roots, and improving the grass plant's ability to stay green without so much water. Apparently they thought it was easier to put a hundred dollars of water on the lawn than seventeen dollars of fertilizer. (We looked at their summertime water bills. Astronomic!) In any case, the lawn has almost no root structure, meaning it was easily damaged by the Bobcat. (It also is easily damaged by Fergus and he wears a lot of grass into the house whenever he lies on it and it sticks to his fur. A healthy lawn wouldn't come up that easily.)

And we weren't horribly upset about the grass being torn up because we plan to landscape with some drought tolerant native plants, like we did in Moab, and remove a lot of the areas that are now in grass. Hopefully, we'll eventually have a yard that requires less maintenance and will be more interesting to us and attract birds as well. And I plan to actually fertilize the remaining grass so it is healthy and vigorous (and uses less water).

This is a picture of the playhouse going down the alley behind our house, on it's way to it's new home. I hope it makes someone very happy.