You are viewing a single comment's thread:
RE: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda
Incoming obvious and probably useless advice... but with some level of experience:
Use a hard rake to get the rocks that are on the surface or close to it, then spend a bit of time pulling out extra ones. Leave the rest in the ground. Or you can actually dig them out using a spade but I don't really know your physical limitations. You can also hire a sod company that has specialized equipment that removes just the top 3-4 inches of soil and all that comes along with it, then they will put down a good mix of sand and topsoil and then sod on top. Many years ago I did this sort of work for summertime money. The machine that carefully removes just a certain amount of exact amount of soil in a certain area is actually quite impressive and exacting.
As far as the irrigation system is concerned, I worked installing those as well. Unless you are near one of the sprinkler heads, the PVC is probably a good foot underground. It's only once you get near the heads that you need to be really concerned because that is where the flexible and also quite easy to damage "funny pipe" is. Normally this can only be used for a few feet because it is far more breakable than PVC is.
For me, I would just hire someone because even you are in decent shape repetitive stress like using a shovel is literally back-breaking work.
I reached out to my friends nephew and he is going to come look at it in a week or so. Ah, like a landscape rake. I bought one of those for my friends cabin one time to get the gunk out of the lake each Spring. This area used to be a really nice flower bed, so I think the previous owners had them put some sprinkler heads fairly close to the work area. Thanks for the advice, that definitely helps!