Man Card Member, No. 404431

So often when talking about work, I've responded, "Man, it was a ton of work this week." But last weekend, the wife and I did a ton of work ... literally.

We've been wanting to make a pizza oven for the backyard, but not a massive permanent installation. Something smaller as a test run to see how it goes and then maybe next year make something more substantial. But our backyard slopes toward the back and the small patio we have at the bottom of our deck stairs is too small and too close to the neighbor's garage, which burning it down would be a bad way to maintain neighborly relations.

We decided to extend the patio by making one that mimics the original in appearance. This turned out to be a little harder than we thought. You'd think it's just a matter of ordering some materials, moving everything into place and BAM a beautiful new patio. Just know that the "moving everything into place" part is just a wee more strenuous than you'd imagine.

How much more strenuous? The railroad ties weigh 250 lbs each. We ordered 10 of em. The fill dirt was 4.5 cubic yards. Looked like an innocent mound in the driveway until we had to shovel and tamp each 2-inch layer of it using manual tampers. And just in case you were wondering, a cubic yard of dirt (according to several sources on the interwebs, so you know it's at least 80% true) weighs between 1,800-2,100 pounds.

Saturday was moving the ties into place one by one and securing them in there as best we could with metal poles driven into the ground. We packed a couple inches of dirt in there, and called it quits for the day when neither of us could barely make it up the deck stairs. Sunday morning we sucked it up, in the pain we were in, and went to Home Depot to rent a powered tamper. In all their classiness, of course, it was broken and couldn't be rented out. Heads lowered in defeat, we headed back home, each downed 5 Advils and went back to shoveling and tamping. By the time we layered all of it in there and made it as waterproof and packed as possible, the two of us had physically moved more than five tons (TONS!) of material. Two people! And one of them was a girl! (yes, I'm throwing that in there just to see if she notices). Without it sounding weird, she definitely gets an honorary Man Card for kicking ass on all that dirt and moving those ties as well.

You can see the progress in the short slideshow below. In a couple weeks we should have the pizza oven made and there's no telling how that building process will go.