Dirt for the Front Yard

The weather is improving, and it seems a good time to get dirt to finish the front yard work.  We have the front yard area pretty well leveled, but it is a ways below the top of the rock walls that surround it -- 4 to 8 inches below.

We calculated that this is about 1600 square feet.  For 6 inches deep, that would be about 32 cubic yards of dirt.  We can only get 18 cubic yards in a delivery, so we order 18 cubic yards of dirt delivered.  Getting Professional Mix from Whittlesey Landscape Supplies, with a $130 delivery fee, that comes to $1001.07.

We use some of this to top-dress the back yard, but the bulk of it goes into filling up the front yard, taking two days work.

Then it rains, so we wait a week and get another truck load of dirt delivered.  16 cubic yards this time (and with a senior citizens discount), comes to $829.60.  Another two days work, and we have the front yard filled in.

We had a ring of mulch around the big Spanish Oak tree, and had to take that off, put dirt underneath and then put it back on.

Back Porch Light Fixture.

There are two light fixtures on the back porch.

By this point, they are very old, corroded and don't put out a lot of light.  It is very difficult to change the light bulbs.  So the thinking was to replace them.

We bought a new fixture from Home Depot -- Milford 4-Light Brushed Nickel Flush Mount -- manufactured by Livex Lighting.  This is an open design with four candelabra (E12) base lights. ($119.92).

Circuit breaker 30 controls these lights, so after turning that off, we removed the old fixture and installed the new one.This took about 30 minutes.

We put 4 "60 Watt" LED bulbs into the light fixture.  Each of these takes about 4.5 watts, so that's only 18 watts total, well under the 40 watt maximum.  But they put out a lot of light.  In our case we got "Daylight" bulbs (5000 degrees Kelvin) putting out 500 Lumens.  With 4 bulbs, we get 2000 Lumens, which is very bright.

Update:  This worked well, so we bought another one of the same light fixture and installed it on the other end of the back porch.

For this one, we put in one Daylight bulb (since we still had one left over) and then put 3 soft-white lights (3000 degrees Kelvin) in the others.