After our fun trip, we were ready to get some work done with the remainder of our Spring Break. The goal was to extend the existing flower garden from the sidewalk all the way to the garage, and to create a new smaller flower garden on the other side of the house.<\/p>\n
Thursday, we went to Home Depot to rent a tiller and buy some plants, fertilizer and topsoil. Once we got that stuff home, the tilling, raking, shoveling, and hauling was to begin in earnest. Unfortunately, the tiller wouldn’t start. The engine was completely seized up. If I pulled any harder, the rope was going to break.<\/p>\n
After Home Depot Trip #2 to return the first tiller, the second one worked fine. Michelle and Andrew had the exhausting task of raking up the dirt and grass I was tilling and hauling it away so we could get to some grass-free dirt for the flower bed. We got lots of the work done before I tilled up a brick which bent a tine so badly, that the tiller could no longer turn. Time for Home Depot Trip #3. Michelle took mercy on me and made this trip to get yet another tiller.<\/p>\n
When she got this tiller home, it was well past dark, but I wanted to finish the job. Well, that wasn’t to be, because this tiller’s engine was seized up also! It was a different model from the first one so I couldn’t believe that it had the exact same problem. It looked like it was time for Home Depot Trip #4, but I ended up fixing the tiller with a HATCHET. That’s not as violent (or satisfying) as it sounds. By removing the pull rope assembly, I was able to fit the blunt end of the hatchet into a notch and finally force the engine to turn. When I finally got it started, it blew out oily smoke for several minutes. It turns out the “seized up” problem was caused by tilting the tiller to get it to fit in the back of our SUV (just like the Home Depot rental guy told us to). This made oil run into parts of the engine it wasn’t supposed to be in.<\/p>\n
Once the thing was running well enough to use, it was past 10. I didn’t want to disturb any neighbors too badly, so I only tilled for a little while. On Friday, I finished with the tiller and returned it to Home Depot. At that point, Michelle and I had tons of raking, hoeing and shoveling left to do. In a race to beat the coming rainstorms, we got everything planted that we wanted to, as well as completed part of a stone border that we hadn’t planned to do yet. That evening, we enjoyed some well-earned rest and relaxation, including board and DVD games with visiting friends.<\/p>\n
Stupidly, I didn’t take any “before” pictures of what we were working on. Soon I’ll post some “after” shots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After our fun trip, we were ready to get some work done with the remainder of our Spring Break. The goal was to extend the existing flower garden from the sidewalk all the way to the garage, and to create a new smaller flower garden on the other side of the house. Thursday, we went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucearmstrong.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}