My husband, Lineman Dad, is a great guy. About 3 months ago he quit his job at a non union company to join the union. We had some money saved up so instead of heading out to find work immediately I, being a clever woman, convinced him to try the "stay at home dad" thing for the duration of tax season, aka April 15th, aka the best.day.of.the.year.
During the first month of said "stay at home dad" job he went a little crazy. The Baby wouldn't let him get much done, so the baby was shipped off to Nana 3 days a week so he could get work done. That was a good decision since he decided to invent a project. The first project was a liquor cabinet. I will say it only took 2 weeks longer than anticipated and it looks amazing in my home. We displayed photos on Facebook and everything.
Then my mother, Nana, who is also recently retired, came up with another small project for Lineman Dad. A homemade trellis she found on Pinterest. Of course this was about a day worth of project... said day project took 3 days because Lineman Dad is a perfectionist and this causes projects to run over his original time line by about 300%.
This is the lead in to the current never ending landscape project. With the liquor cabinet, and trellis done, Lineman Dad needed a new project to keep from going crazy due to lack of work and stress. He did not consider housework to be something to keep his mind active. So I saw a little Pinterest project of my own that looked nice. A raised flowerbed. The version I saw was made of wood and looked like a week long project for my husband. I do not say this often but boy did I miss the estimation on that one.
We are on week 4 or maybe 6 of said raised flower bed and I lost interest 3 weeks ago. I've been out of the blur of tax season for about a week and the progress is steadily .... slow. I go to work and come home to about the same amount of progress. It isn't that he isn't working furiously to get it done so he can go make money again, but he tends to stress rather than do. I am a doer. If something needs to be done lets get it done, except for my CPA because well, that is just different.
Lineman Dad is leaving Monday to find work somewhere closer to home and to make buckets of money to refill our savings account. The current problem with him leaving lies in my flower bed being only partially done. Today the problem was this, we are using retaining wall blocks to build the wall and they will only stack so high before falling down without something holding them from behind. We need dirt. A LOT of dirt. Lineman Dad tells me we need 10 yards of dirt, which for a small raised flowerbed seems excessive. Except it's no longer a small raised bed it stretches the length of our fence and will be 270 cubic yards of space. What? How did THAT happen?
Finally after much discussion and a little bickering and stressing we decided to have the dirt delivered. Now I talked him down to 5 yards of dirt, which seems A LOT more reasonable than 10 plus it should take less time to move, so hopefully he will be using said dirt to fill the bed. But by his calculations he should be able to stack the rest of the blocks in a day worth of time and move all that dirt from the front of the house to the back of the house in a day. That is 2 days worth of work. Remember when I said his timelines are normally 300% off? That means he will definitely not finish my bed by the time he leaves... And so I will forever have to live with an unfinished flower bed. Or do it myself. With Thing 1 and The Baby I just don't see that happening, I mean, retaining wall blocks are heavy. And dirt is pretty heavy and I'm only one woman. I don't want to do this project anymore but we're already way over budget and I just want the stupid thing done so I can plant stupid flowers and maybe that will distract guests eyes from the rest of the backyard which is a mess of overgrown grass, partial flower beds and lots of holes compliments of our dogs.
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