49 Year Old Man vs. 2500 Pounds of Sod
Finding the Artist Buried Under Twenty Years of Tech
49 Year Old Man vs. 2500 Pounds of Sod
Finding the Artist Buried Under Twenty Years of Tech
There’s an artist in me somewhere.
He’s not near the surface. He’s buried under a fierce pragmatism and a load of responsibility and twenty-something years in tech. But he’s there, waiting.
He comes out at strange times, in strange ways. Usually still practically.
I love music but I can’t make it. I love architecture—how it marries utility and beauty into something greater than either alone. I love expressing my thoughts through writing(this substack is me practicing that one.) I love landscaping.
This summer, when we found a house to raise the kids in, I fell in love with the place. The location was ideal. It was old and funky. It had most of what we needed.
But what I noticed—immediately, obsessively—was the potential.
The Blank Canvas
Sure, some of it was pragmatic. The grade was wrong. Water was occasionally seeping into the house when the hard rains came. Drainage needed work.
But when I walked outside the home, all I saw was a blank canvas.
Most would have seen overgrown weeds, shabby railroad ties, some odd and unmaintained attempt at xeriscape.
All I saw was a place for us to hang out and lay with the kids. A place to gather around a fire pit with friends. A space that just feels great to be in. A vision
So I built it.
The journey was haphazard. I didn’t have a detailed plan. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just had to make it happen. So I got started.
The Excavator Saga
That’s kinda how there artistic expressions work for me. When the arise, they build into a compulsion. Something just has to come out of me. I’m not sure how much choice I have in the matter honestly.
First step, dig.
Turns out you can buy a cheap excavator imported from China. That’s a thing. YouTube will show you how. So I did.
Then I proceeded to break said excavator. Hydraulic line failure. Some kind of electrical gremlin. A part that shouldn’t have been able to bend, bent.
I watched a hundred videos to learn how to fix it. Ordered parts from websites I’d never heard of. Got grease in places grease shouldn’t be.
It got the job done.
It’s also sitting in the yard in need of more maintenance before I can try to sell it to the next idealist landscaper in the making. (I’ll make you a great deal)
Rocks Are Heavy
Somewhere on the order of 500-1000 pounds each for the ones I needed. You’re not scooting those around with a shovel, no matter your age.
They are also quite expensive. I’d never given that much thought, but they are. I suppose the suburban market for large decorative stones puts me in a certain socio-economic category. So be it.
They’re also not easy to move. In addition to the excavator, I had to rent a skid steer to actually place them where they needed to go.
I also later learned that I probably didn’t set the rocks perfectly. They may shift as they settle. Things actual landscapers know from experience and from the old timers they worked with. Future Casey’s problem.
But they are beautiful. Just as I had envisioned them. They are my art.
The High-Tech Part
The irrigation system is where my tech brain finally got to play.
I installed an Irrigreen system—robot sprinkler heads that coordinate all the watering automatically. Fewer zones. No coverage gaps. Just GPS-mapped precision.
Being so buried in my tech job, I don’t have reliable space in my calendar to be the Zen gardener I might otherwise prefer. So I built a system that handles it while I’m on calls.
There’s irony here, I know. I spent weeks doing hard physical labor partly to escape screens, then installed a system that runs from an app.
I contain multitudes.
Ship It
I spent more than I thought I would. Little things add up fast. A hydraulic hose here, a valve fitting there, delivery fees, tool rentals.
I could have planned better. More detailed. More precise.
But there’s value in just getting it going and learning along the way. “Ship it,” as we say in tech. Like Agile software, it can evolve and improve. Better to get it in the hands of the user and learn from the real world. Version 1.0 doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist.
The sod came last. Twenty-five hundred pounds of it. Pallets dropped in the driveway on a Friday afternoon, with a weekend to get it down before it died.
Forty-nine years old, moving sod by the armful in the Colorado sun. My back had opinions. My body sent strongly-worded memos.
I did it anyway.
The sod finally relented. It didn’t kill me, but it might have been close.
Once it was all laid though... pure art.
Know the System
Here’s what I could have done: paid someone to just get it done. Professionals who do this every day, who wouldn’t break their excavator, who know which rocks settle and which ones don’t.
I considered it. Got quotes. The number I heard most often: around $25,000 more than what I spent doing it myself.
But the money wasn’t really the point(though I couldn’t afford the pro’s).
Building it myself created an understanding and intimacy with the system. I know where every irrigation line runs. I know which valve controls which zone. I know that one rock in the back corner that looks solid but wobbles if you step on it just right.
When something breaks—and something always breaks—I’ll know where to look. What to try. How the pieces fit together.
I wrote previously about how you can’t download resilience—how some capacities only compile through experience. This is the same principle applied to dirt and rocks and grass.
You can hire someone to give you a finished product. You can’t hire someone to give you the understanding that comes from building it yourself.
The Reward
The project isn’t done. It’ll never really be done. I’ve got plans for phase two already sketched in my head.
But the main space? The gathering place I imagined when we first walked the property?
It exists.
For the Twins’ birthday we had friends over. Kids running around on grass I laid myself. Adults gathered on the rock I designed. That spot I cleared next to the garden where my wife likes to sit with her coffee—she sits there now.
There’s an overwhelming sense of pride I wasn’t expecting. Not pride like ego. Pride like... satisfaction? Completion? The feeling of having made something real with your own hands in a world that increasingly exists behind glass.
I built this. With dirt under my fingernails and sweat in my eyes and a Chinese excavator that gave me more problems than it should have.
The artist finally got to make something, and it was good.
We live in an amazing time. When I was young, gaining access to all this knowledge might have taken forever. The only way to learn was to get a job with someone who knew it, and pay serious dues.
I couldn’t have gained functional competence in irrigation, wiring, PVC plumbing, sod selection, and basic Chinese excavator maintenance in a matter of weeks without YouTube and the internet.
If you have your own artistic vision wanting to come out, I encourage you to go for it.
Mine came out through landscaping. Yours might be different—woodworking, cooking, music, code. Something where you can see the results of your work in real life. Something that gets you off the screens and into the mess of making things.
Whatever it is: find it. Feed it. Let it out.
You don’t have to be good at it. That’s what YouTube is for. You just have to do it.
Your back will recover.
~capshaw