If you rewind a week or so, you’ll remember that I had removed the deck on my side yard. When the deck was pulled up, it became pretty clear that the deck had been sitting in a considerable amount of water from how rotten it was underneath. Once the deck was removed, and another rain storm hit, I could see that water and oh boy, was it shocking. I opened up my french doors to stare at roughly a foot of water in an area bigger than a plastic kiddie pool.

My task today was just to drop the water level down a bit, because I was actually worried about all this water creating a rotting situation underneath my house. So I made the hole bigger, just taking a shovel and removing enough clay mud to drop the water level down along the house. I also carved out a lot of the mud between the tree roots, taking a few of the roots with me. This is by no means a solution, just a short term fix—something to buy myself some time until Russ Kimball the contractor comes by in the morning to discuss some solutions with me.

I obviously have a lot more work ahead of me in regards to the patio project … I have been studying rain gardens and drainage systems (both natural and artificial) all afternoon. Hopefully Russ has some solutions that we can work on once I have bounced all this information and my ideas off him. (He definitely seems like the kind of guy that gets creative about a problem, and also seems to be interested in exploring more ecologically conscious solutions with me.) Even though I am exhausted right now from all that shoveling, I am very grateful for the rain storm of the past few days because otherwise I wouldn’t have seen how the rain interacts with the system in order to make something better out of it. Better to have more information now, for more informed planning, than to put together something that has to be redone in the next rainstorm—right?

The planning stages continue … and once again, Oregon has taught me that I have a lot to learn about living and gardening here! The learning curve has been incredibly steep, but I hope that I can keep an open mind and a watchful eye enough to realize that I need to be a good student or mother nature is going to hand me my ass up here.

On the report for the house, it said the deck supports were rotten so we knew the deck would eventually have to come out. I hired a local contractor to come rip out the deck, and I’m very glad I did because it was really rotten underneath. I was then left with a pile of rotten deck:

And a giant sink hole that was once a deck:

I obviously now have several problems to address. First off, there’s obviously a lot of dirt that needs to be added to this area. Those poor tree roots are hanging out of the ground for lack of organic material! Secondly, what am I going to do with this area? I’d rather not have another deck here, and I definitely don’t want a plain concrete patio. So my idea is to build a sort of “country garden patio” with a mix of stone, urbanite and brick, spaced a bit apart, with sedum and moss growing between the rocks and some built up planters on the sides. Sort of like this in terms of feel, and without the steps: