Tag Archives: demolishing a brick planter

Bubonik

We tried to go back out to work on finishing demolishing the brick planter after a late lunch, but weren’t making much progress. We decided to call it a day and hit it again tomorrow.

WLOX.com

This picture gives you a BIT of an idea of what we’ve been doing since yesterday afternoon.

My husband went out to see if he might be able to dig a hydrangea out of one of two brick planters that are suddenly falling apart in front of our home. (We think the mortar we used must have been bad.)  We built 12 others that are doing fine.

He just started to use a shovel – and part of the whole front of the planter came down with a crash. I was planning to go to my art room to play, and suddenly we were going to the local hardware store for two tarps for the “demolishing-the-planter” project.

We spread one tarp out and held it down with some of the bricks that had fallen off the planter. We spent an hour and a half yesterday trying to dig the big hydrangea out of one end of the planter. My husband dug and cut and I threw bricks into the wheelbarrow and carted them off behind our well house and then stacked them up. We FINALLY got the huge ball and roots of the hydrangea to let go and then spent 10 minutes with both of us working together trying to roll the ball off the end of the civilized portion of our front yard. (The rest is woods.) We called it a day right before dark.

Today we did errands, came home and had our Nutrisystem mid-morning snack. I came in to work on the computer and suddenly noticed things were quiet. (I had again been planning to go upstairs and play in my art room.)

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I looked around and discovered my husband had gone outside to tackle the planter again. I grabbed some gloves and went out to help.

We had another hydrangea, and I suggested we use a pick-ax to break it apart a little at a time. That seemed to work much better. My husband wielded the heavy pick-ax, then I shoveled up the dirt and threw it onto the pile on the tarp. This allowed each of us a bit of time to rest between periods of exertion.

We now have most of the potting soil on the tarp. We’re taking a break, drinking water, and relaxing a bit.

We’ll go back out and see if we can remove the rest of the bricks and then do an extensive clean up. We want to leave the concrete slab as clean as possible, raking the decorative rocks away from the edges of the slab. We’ll use a leaf blower to try to get the remaining soil out of the rocks. We’ll wrap up the tarp, putting bricks on top to keep the soil intact as much as possible.

We have another planter to do, but I’m not sure we’ll get to that one now. We have already purchased a pallet (or whatever you call it) of bricks to use to rebuild the planters. If we can find an expert to do it that we can afford, we’ll do it. If not, we’ll get busy mixing mortar in the spring…

Maybe TOMORROW I can play.