Home improvement sweeps across area
Mulch Mountain just happened.
It was done in the spirit of home improvement, which has hit southwest Riverside County like a force of nature this spring.
Hammering, sawing, drilling and digging have been relentless in these parts since the late 1980s.
Back then it was new home construction. The staggering growth transformed the area, population multiplying at least four times — from rural to metropolis — in what seemed like moments.
Now the metropolis is aging. Longtime homeowners are stuck with dated carpet, peeling paint, rickety fences, dying grass and other maladies.
Emerging from the 13-month pandemic, many locals have accumulated money that couldn’t be spent on travel, dining or even haircuts. Fueled by three federal stimulus payments many were fortunate enough to receive, there’s lots of unspent cash.
For those who can’t afford to buy a new home or love low property taxes and paid-off mortgages, the best way to upgrade is to renovate.
In our 33-year-old Murrieta neighborhood, one neighbor decided to erect a new fence — one of those nice white ones that don’t change color as they age. There go the dominoes because you can’t do it alone, at least financially. Just like that, seven new fences.
A new fence in our case also meant a new backyard. Our three dogs dug up the beautiful space that we inherited from the original homeowner more than 20 years ago. Just in time for a decade of college bills my wife Joanne and I endured.
Certain homeowner actions are a statement, such as the one we made when we had 13 cubic yards of mulch dumped in our driveway recently.
Having never been much of a do-it-yourselfer before (preferring to either call a handyman or just let the weeds take over), Mulch Mountain was proof to my neighbors that my home improvement chops were legit.
How was the mountain built? An online calculator told me to get 10 cubic yards and I asked a neighbor if he wanted to share.
I’ll pass, he said, but make sure you get enough. He ordered for his kid’s play equipment and made three trips to fetch enough mulch.
Operating with the logic I used in college when ordering beer for a party, I got 30% more than the mulch company calculator calculated.
I was substitute teaching the morning of the delivery, so I left the RV gate to our back yard open, figuring the driver could back the truck onto our basketball court and dump.
I really didn’t want to show off Mulch Mountain in my driveway.
Problem was the truck required to transport a mountain was so big that they guy couldn’t fit through the gate. So he dumped it in the driveway.
I was shocked when I returned home and saw the mountain. Sheepishly, I borrowed a wheelbarrow to start moving the mountain to my backyard.
I made 22 trips in the first 20 hours and barely made a dent. Think of a squirrel chipping away at Mount Everest.
It was no problem getting rid of it. One neighbor helped me move it in exchange for many loads of it. The neighbor who said he was good needed some, it turned out.
Literally hundreds of wheelbarrow loads later, Mulch Mountain is drought-tolerant ground cover. Combined with 24 plants, the backyard is transformed.
On tap next is finishing the indoor painting, redoing a second bathroom and the granddaddy of all home improvements: new flooring.
Then there are the upgraded windows, new garage doors, more backyard stuff and redoing the third bathroom.
Once you start remodeling a 33-year-old home, the to-do list never ends.
A good problem to have.