The Saga of the Sherwood Front Yard
3 planter boxes, a new lending library, AND a retaining wall??? Wow!
Last week at my 21st birthday party, I had an absolutely WONDERFUL time catching up with Aryaman and Ariv; I hadn’t seen Ariv in a few days, Aryaman in a few months, and was hearing all about their summers.
Eventually Aryaman asked me how the last few months were for me — I extremely briefly mentioned my summer internship, then proceeded to spend about 15 minutes described how I spent the good part of 2 months renovating the front yard of Sherwood. Along with the epic tale, I showed him all the pictures I had of the monumental transformation, and became more and more animated in my description as it went on.
Towards the end, I realized that I love talking about this front yard transformation so much, have told it to so many people, and am still so proud of it that I really should write an entire blog post around it. Something with nothing but pictures and the epic tale of…
THE RENOVATION OF THE SHERWOOD FRONT YARD!!!
First, here is a little background about Sherwood: It’s a “14-person student housing cooperative located in U-District, just a five-minute walk from the University of Washington Campus.”
Basically, what that means is that 14 University of Washington (UW) students live together in a kumbaya-utopia house, where we share groceries and common spaces, do chores together, and live to harmony to keep the house clean and in good shape for future generations.
There’s also the very pleasant side effect of the house slightly falling apart since most students only live there for a year or two, monetary funds tend to be low, and anything that breaks is fixed just enough so that it doesn’t break before the fixer moves out.
In all seriousness, though, Sherwood was an absolutely amazing place to live during the summer, meet some wonderful people, and have a place to return to and chill while working long hours in my Seattle summer internship.
So how did we get to the front yard getting renovated?
I’m glad you asked!
When I first moved in, the front yard was a catastrophe. Everything was overgrown, the dirt was eroding onto the sidewalk, wild mint was growing everywhere, and to top it all off, direct family members of Remy from Ratatouille were living comfortably among the chaos (translation: rats were living in the rotten planter beds).
During this period, I also happened to have a good amount of free time. The first two weeks of my internship, I wasn’t put on an actual project, would finish up what little work I had quickly, and then would have the rest of the afternoon/morning to do what I wanted. To keep me sane and to have a physical project to undergo, I decided to recruit my housemate Jackson and begin transforming the front yard.
This is what the front yard initially looked like:
Yikes, this is even worse than I remember! As you can see, there’s a lot of work to be done.
The general plan for renovating was as follows:
Get rid of all the old planter boxes
Build new planter boxes
Figure out how to fix the erosion
Fix the erosion
Celebrate!
The first step of the process was removing the old planter boxes — Jackson and I yanked them all out, dug out some rotten ones, and learned that there were actually two more planter beds that were completely overgrown and buried. We didn’t even notice that they were there!
Once we removed all of the old, rotten wood and put it all in a nice big pile, we built one new planter box from scrap wood at the house (leftover from a recent renovation of the front porch), and put the new box in place. We built it on the sidewalk, lifted it over the existing planter bed, and lowered it into place (for those curious, the measurements for the planter box was 4 feet wide, 12 feet long, and 1 foot high).
After the first victory, we began the MONUMENTAL undertaking of removing another planter bed and moving all of its dirt across the yard. There were probably about 50 cubic feet of soil to move, and boy were our shoulders sore afterward!
After removing the first planter bed and installing the first new one, this is what the yard looked like:
Wow, what a huge improvement already!
At this point, we had no more scrap wood, so Jackson and I headed to Home Depot to get the rest of the wood for the last two boxes. We didn’t have a van, so we rocked up in Jackson’s wonderful Subaru, bought the wood on the Sherwood credit card, carefully loaded up the car, and were off on the freeway! Slow and steady wins the race, and we were back at Sherwood in no time with the precious, precious lumber cargo:
With the new wood, we built two more planter boxes on the sidewalk and lifted them on over the other planter beds. As we were experienced planter box builders, this step took very little time, and the front yard had three new boxes in no time at all! We then removed the other planter bed (on the far side of the yard), and the yard was looking so much better already:
Now that the planter boxes were all done, Jackson and I focused our attention on replacing the lending library in the front yard (basically, where people could leave/exchange books and other trinkets, and boy, were there some strange trinkets!). The existing one was nice and rotten, completely leaking, and generally disheveled. It was time for a change.
Jackson and I found some cut plywood in the woodshed that was cut in the perfect shape for a new lending library (probably because someone was planning to build a new one, then moved out before finishing their project), so Jackson and I quickly built a new one.
We painted it a few coats of Sherwood blue, then installed it over the weekend! My UCLA friend Sanketh was visiting for a few days, so he helped out with the installation, too. It was quite the handyman day, with great success :)
It was a ton of fun doing this (I definitely love woodworking more than landscaping, but landscaping is still a great time, too), especially with Sanketh helping out!
At this point, I know what you’re thinking: “Dennis, can we get an aerial view?”
Why yes, dear reader, you can! I had climbed up on the roof one afternoon to see what it looked like from above, and it looked GREAT!
Now that we were done with the planter boxes and lending library, it was time for the FINAL AND MOST EPIC PART OF THE ENTIRE FRONT YARD RENOVATION…
The retaining wall!
The retaining wall!
The retaining wall!
HOORAY!
There was quite a bit of uncertainty around what we were going to do with the sidewalk side of the yard, as it was completely eroding and wasn’t looking too good. I made the executive decision to build a beautiful retaining wall there instead, and after a house meeting, the decision (and budget of about $500) were approved.
And so the preparations began!
I dug out a trench to make room for the bricks, then ordered the retaining wall bricks from Home Depot to be delivered to our front yard. With about 200 bricks and 3 bags of gravel, the total weight was well over 4000 pounds.
That’s just a tad bit over the weight limit of Jackson’s Subaru, so we paid the extra $70 for delivery. Definitely the right decision for the sake of his car.
And on Friday morning, a Home Depot forklift with our materials arrived, dropped everything off in the front yard, and promptly drove away, never to be seen again. For the people eating breakfast on the porch and not notified beforehand that this was happening, it was quite the confusing time.
lol
It was a bright and sunny Saturday morning when Jackson and I started building this bad boy, and I could hardly be more excited. I had been looking forward to building the retaining wall for two ENTIRE weeks (I’d been traveling for work to SF) and was so excited to return to Seattle to begin the construction.
Long story short, the construction went perfectly. The trench was dug exactly as needed, the gravel was well laid, and Jackson and I were stacking those retaining wall bricks like fresh Legos. I was especially proud of our corners, which gracefully curved around the lending library and the massive boulder on the other side of the yard.
And besides a perfect retaining wall, Jackson and I also ended up with a beautiful time-lapse documenting the entire construction, which I cannot recommend watching enough!
The construction was tiring and dusty, and Jackson and I celebrated with some delicious smoothies made from the amazing Sherwood blender. I know you didn’t ask, but the secret delicious recipe is:
1/4 of a blender’s worth of frozen berry mix
Two BIG scoops of peanut butter
Any fresh fruit you have (2 bananas or some fresh berries work the best)
1 box of coconut water
Ice
And MMMMMMMMMMMMM is that smoothie yummy!
After the retaining wall was done, the front yard renovation was nearly complete! All that was left was leveling out the dirt on the front yard, and finishing up the side of the retaining wall. Jackson leveled the yard one afternoon, and I finished up the side after a short workday.
And so we made it! After 2 months of on-and-off work, Jackson and I finished the front yard. Once the rainy season starts again, grass will be planted, vegetables will be sown, and many great memories will continue to be made in that front yard. Thank you Jackson (and Sanketh) for the great summer experience, I can’t wait to visit Sherwood again soon!
Best,
Dennis :)
Great job, Dennis and Jackson on making the front yard look beautiful! 👏👏👏