Who Farted??

So guess what Matt and I did this weekend?

We spent most of our free time this weekend dealing with this.


What you might not be able to read on the little yellow tag basically says that our gas has been shut off due to a gas leak.  Fantastic! We came home to find this and a notice taped to our door on Thursday night.

Our neighbor was sitting in her backyard because the weather was pretty awesome Thursday doing whatever retired people do in the middle of the day.  Then she said that she felt dizzy all of the sudden and smelled gas.  She called Xcel right away for them to come check for a leak and of course they found a leak in our back yard.  Unfortunately who ever found the gas leak and shut off our gas didn't tell our neighbor where the leak was or leave note on the notice that they taped to our door.

So Friday I woke up and started removing mulch and rock from above the gas line.  I got about half of that done before I had to go to work.  Not too bad for 1 1/2 hours and it would help when we have time to work together on Sunday.

Second heap of bad news coming.  So on Saturday while I was at work I checked the weather forecast to see how nice and warm Sunday was going to be.  The Weather Channel did not get the news flash that we had plans to dig all day and had something else in mind.  Like cold, rain, and snow.  And since digging in the rain and snow can be difficult that left Matt holding the short end of the stick, or in this case a shovel.  I think he had been digging for about 6-7 hours by the time I got home from work.  I did what I could to help and stay out of the way until around 8pm.  With rain and snow on the way we covered our trench with some cardboard that we had from our hardwood flooring and hoped for the best.




Now time for a shallow luke warm bath!!!


Fast forward to Monday morning, the plumber arrived.  We walked out to the back so I could show him the pipe and stuff.  He started taking the pipe apart to check the connections and found that the seal had corroded.  Leak found!!!  So he just needed some new connections and a little bit of new pipe, we decided to have the line moved up closer to ground level.  That turned out to be a good thing because all the snow from Sunday was melting and rapidly filling up our nice trench.  After he put it all back together he sprayed the pipe with an enamel spray paint to protect the pipe from rusting and then he was off to his next job.


Now our gas is back on, the house is warming up and I am about to go take an awesome hot shower once the water heats up.  This is one day out of my life that I won't get back but there is one positive thing to come out of all this; backyard makeover is on the table right now!!!

That's right, in the midst of all the back breaking digging I asked Matt how he felt about starting to work on re-doing our back yard.  You know, since we already dug some of it up and all.  I totally expected him to call me crazy and shoot it down right away but he actually thought it was a good (ish) idea!

So stay tuned!! I'll give you the full run down of what we're working with back here and maybe even some of our ideas that we have for the space.  Oh, and if you've seen anything amazing for tiny backyards leave me a link in the comments section.  I'd love to see what kind of awesome things you have out there!