To finish the walkway, I need to excavate the section that connects what has been done to the back patio. This goes over the main irrigation water supply line -- a one inch PVC line that runs from the meter, by the street, along the East side of the house (thru Zone 2), and then across the backyard, and up the West side, and then across the front yard, effectively a rectangle around the entire house.
In addition, the remaining walkway goes over the telephone line, the cable line, and the electrical lines, all of which are buried and run roughly from the edge of the house, near the rain barrel, to the green transformer box in the middle of the backyard, by the fence.
All of these need to be below the walkway. I can't do much about the water supply line, but the others -- the cable, telephone and electrical lines, I want to put way down under ground, so that they don't get messed up if we work in the back yard. I know that at the moment the telephone and cable lines are just below the surface.
The idea is to bury a large 4 inch PVC tube as a conduit that will house the telephone and cable lines, and if they need to be replaced, the new line can just be slipped into the conduit; no one will need to dig up the back yard to do this.
So I need to find the lines, excavate down as far as I can and put in the PVC conduit from the house to the fence and run the cable and telephone in it, before I can finish the walkway. That is the current project.
I keep forgetting to take a picture before I start any work, but this is pretty much what the backyard looks like now. The idea is to excavate it down about 24 inches, starting on the East side and going all the way across the back yard to the West side. That will allow a couple of new trees to be put in, providing shade in the hot summer sun.
I started to dig in a line along the East edge.
I'm hitting rock almost immediately -- an inch or two below the surface in spots. No wonder that the grass would not grow.
