My wife and I have been furloughed from our jobs since October 1 and we aren’t sure when we’re going to be able to work. I want to be absolutely clear about this - we want to work, but it is actually illegal for us to do so. It is even illegal for us to use any work equipment. While we are stuck at home, we have decided to look over all the neglected things at our house.

Trimmings

We trimmed the bamboo for about two or three days.

cutting tree limbs

Then, we also trimmed a few short trees that are touching the house.

cutting bamboo

Power washing

We noticed that we were slipping on our driveway and sidewalk a lot during all this and so we did power washing one day too!

power washing the driveway

This also reminded us that we needed to deal with the water drainage a bit on our sidewalk and so we placed some stones. My wife and our kids colored some of them.

landscape stones along a sidewalk

Stumps

We saw were all the decomposing stumps in our yard. Several trees were cut down probably five to ten years ago, which is fine but now, in 2025, these are now becoming sink holes. I dropped some pebbles down one of them and it went down into infinity which again might be fine, but these stumps are next to our house. Our foundation. So I got like five bags (0.5 cubic feet each) of pea pebbles and threw them down the hole. They disappeared. I did it again and they mostly disappeared.

pea pebble bags in trunk

Here it is after 40 bags. stump partially filled with rocks

We put another 15 bags of topsoil to level it out. stump filled in with rocks and dirt

We actually found an additional four stumps around the house and repeated this process. In all, I think that we calculated that we used somewhere betweet 1.25 and 1.5 cubic yards of stone/dirt.

Retaining wall

Next, we had a rough side yard where we had some erosion. We decided to make a retaining wall. First, we dug a trench and then leveled it out. Then, we added a garden cloth, then fine gravel, then heavy 40 pound blocks.

trench with blocks in it

My wife knows a lot more than me about this kind of stuff, and so I tried to read up on it. This is an excerpt from our book.

page of book about contructing a retaining wall

We mostly followed the instructions and it came out well!

a finished retaining wall

Irrigation

After the wall, we needed to fix up the water system. One pipe is a drain from our driveway; the other is from our gutters. We joined them and spraypainted them.

The wall with fixed pipes

Rain barrel

We also moved our rain barrel to the back yard. We leveled out some land next to our back wall and put it on there.

Next, we cut a piece of the downspout and joined it with the rain barrel.

rain barrel

Playground

Just for an extra thrill, we stained our playground in the back yard. It should give it another year or two of life :)

playground

We also stained the picnic table but I don’t have a specific picture for that.

Stepping stones

And then to make tie it all in a bow, we got 32 stepping stones that probably weigh 20 pounds each. We laid each one on the ground and leveled 15 of them before the furlough ended. Each one, as it was leveled, had a bed of gravel and then dirt or sand to fill in the gaps, and then the step was laid on it. I used a level to make sure that each one was approximately (but not perfectly) level.

stepping stones outside of the house

Light switches

My wife also did one more fun thing on the sly. She printed and cut out these cool decals for our light switches! I thought I’d end this post with a fun small thing instead of all these huge back breaking things! (oof!)

light switches with decals

Conclusion

…Is there actually a conclusion? Because there are so many more projects to do and I am so tired! And also, I’d rather be at work :/