Backyard Renovation, April 2009

Knowing I’d have to rent a “Bobcat” (a small bulldozer) to grade, or flatten, the backyard, kept me from really starting the renovation. The flagstone sat behind the house, weeds growing around it, bunnies and snakes taking up residence…until some new neighbors moved in several doors down! Tony and Lindsey, a young couple who completely renovated their house just like I did.

Tony worked in landscape contracting, among other things, and I noticed that he had a Bobcat sitting in his backyard! I figured he’d let me rent it from him, and even if I didn’t get a better deal than from an equipment rental place, I wouldn’t have to rent a truck and trailer to haul it to my house! But, as we didn’t know them very well yet, I didn’t want to ask.

Still, I had to get started somewhere, so we decided it was time to rip out the 100 square foot wood deck that led off the back porch. I pried up the boards carefully. I didn’t want to damage them, because I planned to use them as forms to pour concrete for various structures around the back yard. The wood went into the garden, which would have to take a season off as I needed that space as a staging area for the renovation.

To my extreme surprise, once I had gotten the deck removed and brushed away the dirt and decomposed wood below it, there was a 4″ concrete patio under there! NIGHTMARE! That would have to go, so I got out my sledgehammer. After an hour of screaming and swinging that thing, it broke right in half! And I had busted up only a small corner of the slab. I knew I’d have to resort to more drastic measures.

A quick trip to Home Depot, and I came home with a medium-duty electric jackhammer. It costs about $40 for 4 hours of rental, including insurance, which you should definitely get, because if you damage or break one of the chisel heads, they are EXPENSIVE!!!

I had never used a jackhammer before, but it was super easy. Very loud, and hard on the hands, but you just bear down and the chisel splits the concrete.

Tony heard the noise from several doors down and came to see what I was up to. He first picked up my pick axe and helped break up the chiseled concrete, but eventually he wanted to have some fun with the jackhammer, so I gave it to him. (He’s quite a bit stronger than me, he had the rest of the slab busted up in a fraction of the time it had taken me to do a third of it!)

Tony asked what my next step was, and I said I needed to rent a Bobcat to grade, or flatten, the backyard. The patio would be on two levels, but the backyard slopes considerably and there was quite a bit of grading to be done before we could lay down a sub-base for the flagstone.

“Well, let me go grab the Bobcat in my back yard, man! I love using that thing!”

“WHAT?!?  Wow!  I’ll pay you for it!” I said.

“Shut up. We’re neighbors. Actually you’ll be doing me a favor, I love that thing and I hardly ever get to use it.”

I took down a fence panel while he ran back to the house, and a few minutes later he was scooping up the busted up concrete.

Then he got to work grading the yard. He took several inches off the top of the ground near the back door, and deposited it out by the fence where the ground was lower. Then he ran back and forth over the freshly-laid dirt, compacting it.

Tony grades and compacts the back yard with the bobcat.

After watching Tony maneuver that bulldozer in the cramped quarters of our backyard, I was SO GLAD that I hadn’t tried to rent one and operate it myself. He was an expert, obviously, and I could literally imagine myself breaking through a wall into the living room!

Less than 30 minutes after he started, he was done. It would have taken me all day, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good. He also used the dozer to scoop out an area where I would expand my garden and relocate the compost pile…saving me a couple of days of shoveling.

If your backyard needs grading, expect to pay about $300-$600 to get some guy off Craigslist to bring his Bobcat over and do the grading, depending on the scale of the project. If you hire a landscape contractor, you’ll pay twice that. You can rent them for about $100 an hour if you have experience doing it yourself, but you’ll have to haul the Bobcat to your place and back. And have plans for what to do with all the leftover dirt you’ll scrape up, if it won’t be deposited somewhere else in the yard.

Believe it or not, that was a single afternoon. All of it. I started cutting up the deck around noon, and by 5pm the concrete patio had been busted up and the yard was graded. I lavished thanks on Tony for saving us hundreds of dollars, and he just waved us off.

“It was more fun than watching TV, which is what I’d still be doing if I hadn’t heard your jackhammer.”

Now the yard was graded and it was time for the next project! Retaining walls!