surprise landscaping

So the guy who i lean into when talking casting called me up because he saw me driving around. Decided to come by and check out the house - he hadn't seen it in like four months. He brought a buddy who he's mentoring and we get to talking because this guy is a contractor. I showed him the indoor barbecue which is falling over and he offered to get rid of it. I asked for a bid, he gave me one, and lo and behold the next day I was losing four cubic yards of bricks.

Dude is a Tasmanian devil. He saw me clearing some of my blackberries and said "the guy who's hauling stuff to the dump is also a landscaper, he'll be here tomorrow would you like to talk to him" and I said "sure!" But what he said to the landscaper was "clear the blackberries."

So I get there and things are well underway. They ask me how much of what they saw was mine and when I said "all of it" they sorta took a pause. I said "yeah i mean let's get around the front and then let's take a breath" which was good because within about five hours my guy from the City showed up.

"Here unofficially," he said. "We know you're trying to do the right thing here and can be trusted."

"Also I asked you what I could do and you gave me verbal permission to clear out all the weeds so long as I didn't use heavy equipment," I reminded him. He nodded and held up his hands in a placating gesture.

"All that is true," he said. "So I'm here in an unofficial capacity, as a friend, to let you know that the office has gotten six calls about this and we're curious what your mitigation plan is."

"Uhm... huckleberries, twinberries and sword ferns?" I said. Once they started clearing things out I went back and looked at the lists the county conservation district had given me just weeks before, because I invited them out to tell me what to do with my ravine.

"What's your immediate mitigation plan," they said.

"...what should it be," I asked.

"How about three inches of straw," they said.

"On it!" I said.

So what started as "Sure, I'll talk to you about removing the blackberries" became four days of work and $1800 in native plantings. I had to have a Come To Jesus with Mr. Tasmanian Devil in which i said that five thousand dollars worth of landscaping wasn't on my agenda for that week and he needed to slow his fucking roll. And that I was damn lucky that I had already talked to the city and the county and already had a relationship and plans in hand or I'd be looking at an easy ten thousand dollars in fines.

"No one could have predicted that - " he started and I said

"No, dude, I've done landscaping on this house before and they're super anal. I don't have rocks on that hill because it requires city council approval and a yearly insurance agreement on file. they made me measure the ground height under my photinias before they'd give me permission to cut them even though they're diseased and dying. I COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. ME. Because I know what's up and you don't."

So that cooled his jets a little? he's still like a ferret on crack. Trying to keep him occupied with shit that needs to happen now rather than shit that will need to happen at some point as permits and the like fall into place.

But the best part is they were wrapping up when my dragging-ass-since-september landscape planner and architect showed up. "Yeah, it's just natives but also I didn't have to stand in my yard so you could charge me $150 to explain a drawing." They don't know they're super-fired yet but they probably suspect it, and that was liberating.

I am coming to the realization that I was an apex fucking predator of an architectural consultant. In 2003 I was on five of the AIA Top Ten nationwide. Was I an architect? I was not. But I'm sure as shit not one of these fuckin Houzz dilettantes. I fuckin' had to draw my patio. In SolidWorks. INDIVIDUAL BRICKS. Before my architect came back with "oh you want this detail, here you go" and she's the best-of-breed. FOURTH fucking architect I've hired.

I got a pond now tho

printed and framed a 24x36 photo i took in north cascades National park a couple of years ago! really happy with how it turned out and was happy to pay a premium to get it done by the local shop a mile away.