Cameron's 5-Day Yard Makeover

Hey everyone! This is Cameron. This is my first attempt at all this blog what-not. Hillary thought it was appropriate for me to write about this one since she wasn't even there.

So, on the last day of school as soon as my last final was over I hobbled to the car on my crutches (see last post) and headed to the Greyhound bus station to catch a ride home to Spokane. Hillary still had to work so she stayed home in Rexburg, but because all my jobs are on campus I don't work when school is out. What is normally only a 7 hour drive becomes 11+ hour bus ride when you have to stop for smoke breaks every 1-2 hours. It is worse than having to stop for toddler potty breaks. I think I was one of 5 people out of the almost 100 passengers that would stay on the bus during these little smoking siestas. But thankfully no bus breakdowns so I made it home and Mom and Scottie came to get me at 1 am.

Ok, I will actually get to the yard work now. So when I was home the summer of 2007 I told my parents I wanted to build a waterfall in the backyard. They said fine, but we want you to build these few little walls first. I thought the walls would take me like a week to finish, but I was very wrong. The Great Wall of Lovinger took me that entire summer to finish but I found a new love/hobby in landscaping.

So this summer I was dedicated to build that waterfall, even though I only had a few days. The only other project I had left before it was the fire pit area. Before I got there, while my Mom was gone one weekend the boys did some demolition and tore down the nasty lava rock fire place. We thought it would be a good, kinda sentimental idea to build the fire pit out of that same rock. We decided to make a little bench out of the stone hearth as well. So Tyler headed up putting together the actual pit, I built the wall, and Sean and Scott carried endless wheel barrows of bricks and gravel. After all of hard work, I think it turned out pretty good. We had a fire almost every night for the next week down there. It was perfect!

I think the cherry tree will be a nice addition.


Here is a close up of the lave rock fire pit and the hearth-bench.

We tried to build a little stone love seat in to the wall near the fire pit.

We even built stairs into the wall for more easy access the fire pit area.

Here is a side view.

Now time for the waterfall. I have been taking pictures and taking notes in my mind for how I wanted my waterfall to look for years now. I don't know why, but I have always had a fascination with waterfalls. My mom didn't want an actual pond, so we decided to go for the water feature at the top and waterfall in the middle. The water feature part is concrete cast, which we quickly found out is extremely heavy. The smallest piece I would guess to be around 200 lbs so Sean and I could get it fairly easily. The middle piece was probably near 500 lbs, and Sean and I were able to wheel barrow it over with only skirting death a few times. Now the largest piece was a whole different story. I would bet that monster is near 1000 lbs. Now that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is not far off. Sean and I couldn't even budge it only the two of us. We got Scottie and my Dad to help and we could still barely move it. We had to have all four of us roll it up the hill. It was a bit treacherous.

Once we got the concrete up on top, the only thing left to to was run the electrical wiring. Now did I mention I had never done anything like that before? That was the worst disaster of all. Jon Spear and I played around with it until nearly 1 am that night and it only barely worked. We just happened to have an electrician come by the house the next morning. When he got there he looked at me, at the spliced amateur wiring, back at me and then just shook his head in shame and disgust. He was really nice did give me a few pointers how to fix it.

All in all it turned out awesome. We even got Montana river rock to line the bottom because it reminded us of being at Glacier National Park in Montana. Sadly, I finished it all about noon that day and we had to leave an hour later to go camping at Glacier. I am happy to finally have my waterfall!