It all began with a broken water line

2 trips to the lumber yard, 4 trips to The Home Depot, 1 trip to that other home improvement store, 3 trips to Ace, 1 auger, 1 big digger tractor, 3 days with NaNa and Papa, help from the entire DeFeo fam (even Ella helped), LOTS of wood, 9 bags of Cement, 60 2' rebar, 54 HUGE nails, and lots of other stuff - thats what it takes to build a retaining wall and a fence at the Douglas house in 3 days with lots of rain and an auger (motorized hole digger) that doesn't work. Yikes!

What an ordeal this has been, but Art and his dad have persevered. It all began with a broken water line as they were nailing in the first board. Then the plumber never showed up. So now you can count on Art to fix your water line if you ever do this at your house! Forget about paying $400 like one plumber asked! Just call Art! Saturday, all was going well with the help of Ron, until the storms can into town. How dare them come uninvited. From then on work was sporadic but we (mostly Art and Papa) leveled out the yard and completed the wall. By the way, we thought that would be mostly done by nightfall on Friday and this was Saturday around 8pm. Sunday we woke up to a soaked yard full of mud and 40 degree weather. I mean, COME ON! Its springtime...and we have work to do. I tried to work as hard as I could to help out but there are somethings that men just do better. By 7pm all 24 posts were in the ground and level. Whew. What a weekend. Now through the next days and weeks Art and I will be adding the boards and finishing up the yard. As you can see we have made a mess of the yard but the fence is so great. Hopefully now we can keep Emma Kate a little more contained. Yeah, right!

Here is the house with the posts and wall! And one of EK and Ella working hard!!!