The Joys of Homeownership

Clay and I have been in our house for a little over a year now and have loved living there. The house is the perfect size for us, we love our neighborhood, we have a big back yard and tons of beautiful day lilies, and we love how close we are to work/school. But there are definitely a few headaches that go along with owning your own place and for the past few weeks we’ve been suffering from a homeownership migraine!

Aren't they beautiful! These lilies make me happy!

 

Shortly after we moved in, we noticed that water pooled in the driveway after a hard rain. The standing water made it pretty hard for me to get in and out of my car when it was raining but we put up with it for almost a year because we didn’t really know what to do about it.

This summer we decided to tackle some of our yard issues and the flooding problem was our first project. We thought that the clay (the red sticky stuff, not my husband) wasn’t absorbing enough water so we decided to dig up the clay and put stones in the trench. The water would collect under the stones and then quickly evaporate after the rain. Sound simple enough, right? Wrong.

First of all, digging out a giant hole of Alabama red clay is no easy task! The clay is incredibly compact and sticky, which makes for tiresome digging. Once we got all of the clay out and the rocks in, we waiting a few days for a good, hard rain. Well, the rain came and then it didn’t stop for 2 weeks and we found out quickly that the rocks only exacerbated the problem. We spent the next 2 weeks pumping water out of the hole in our yard and brainstorming ideas for our flooding problem that didn’t involve an engineer, landscaper, and several thousand dollars. It wasn’t fun for anyone…

Muddy driveway after the rock solution. Gross.

 Finally, this weekend brought us sunny weather and a nice breeze so we dug out the rocks and planted a rain garden along our driveway. We mixed together 4 different types of super absorbent soil and planted water friendly bushes. We are still waiting for a big rain to tell us if we’ve succeeded or not, but for now it looks good and I don’t have red clay all over everything I own!  Keep your fingers crossed for us. If this doesn’t work, I think Clay might move out :) 

Our rain garden. Hopefully these puppies are thirsty!