A few weeks ago, we decided to test the ground to see if the soil was soft enough to start digging…and it was! Our first plans for the spring was to get the rest of the bottom part of the yard leveled and all the piles of soil that we dug out from the pool area spread out evenly along the rest of the yard.

The yard naturally slopes towards our back fence, so we wanted to bring that up just a bit to minimize that slight slope. This will end up burying a small portion of our fence, but that will be fine, it is a minimal amount, perhaps 4″.

By doing this, we will have a fairly level yard, with a barely noticeable slope in the bottom right corner (Standing at the top, looking down to the bottom fence) of the yard. Oddly enough, the slope seems to be a bit more drastic from the centre to the left corner of the yard. That being said, we may have cut in a lot more of the right side of the yard when we were doing our walls. The right side is far steeper than the more gentle slope on the left.

So we grabbed our shovels and away we went with getting the soil moving. We originally thought that this would be a few nights of digging for an hour or so to start getting everything leveled and spread out. Luckily, we were wrong!

The piles were easy to spread and it was quickly taking shape. We ended up deciding to push through and get the soil all spread out.

We did take a few little breaks, but we did end up getting the piles spread and the ground leveled. It is always so nice when a project that we think will take a certain amount of time, ends up taking just a small fraction of what we had thought. Perhaps we have become efficient at digging after all these years!

We did have to finally remove one of our original raised bed irrigation lines. It will be in the middle of the new deck, so out it had to come. We just capped it at the main line and will be good to go. The irrigation line where our old strawberry tower was will stay and become our main line to water the lawn. We may pull it back closer to the fence so that it will only need to do a 180* spray rather than a 360. I’m hoping that we can use the sprinkler to irrigate the flower beds there as well, but may have to run some drippers to the actual beds if need be.

As expected, the location of the deck is still sloped, enough that we will have a bit of a step down on one side with the other side sitting down on the ground. This will be easy enough to sort out since it isn’t a drastic drop. We did consider digging it out, but decided that the way we plan to build the deck will make it easy enough to manage the slight slope that is left remaining.

Now that the ground was even again and not housing mounds of soil, it was easy to see the space that we were working with. I think this may be the first time that we have absolutely no mounds of dirt in the bottom part of the yard, allowing us to see the actual size of the space. It surprised us, being much larger than we thought.

Grabbing some stakes, we measured out the footprint of the deck we plan to build. It will be 13′ x 16′. The gazebo size that we would like to add to it will be 12′ x 14′, so we want a little extra space around the gazebo footprint. We plant to have some lattice one one side for some additional privacy screening. We have awesome neighbours on the right side, but their pool is on a terrace as well and overlooks the back of our yard. We are all great about offering what privacy we can, but having some decorative lattice up will provide both of us a bit more privacy. I imagine they will also appreciate it as well.

The rest of the yard, about a 1/4 of the back portion, will end up being a grass are with some additional flower beds. We will trim the entire green space with some beds that will be dedicated to flowers. Some will be perennial, and some will be annuals….though again, maybe we will just plan perennials and enjoy a lower workload each spring.

Over the coming week or two, we plan to get building. I will get some plans drawn up for the framing sometime this week. Then I will be able to draw up our purchase list…which is likely to be a decent amount since we will be doing duradeck so that we don’t have to worry about staining or sanding every few years.

Once we have that, we will get posts in the ground and start the build! We would like to get the deck done before it gets too hot out. Though at least this year, we will have a pool to jump into to cool off. Digging the pool pad last year in May, made me dream of the cool waters that would provide relief in future years for building.

Really, when I think about, the pool should have been the very first thing we did! It would have made all of the rock wall building and hot landscaping work much more bearable. Oh well, at least we have it now!