How Mike's Pandemic Gardening Project Made Me Question Everything

About two years ago, we found out that the wood retaining wall under our deck was rotting and needed to be replaced. That meant ripping out the fence, the stairs from the deck down to the lawn, and all the overgrown bushes along the back of the house. Our house is a series of weird angles (we think the architect was drunk when he designed it), which the overgrown brush covered up to some extent (at least in that area), so thinking about what we would build in its place made my head spin. In some ways, I preferred to keep the old with the possibility of something better in the future, rather than trying to figure out what that “something better” actually was.

In truth, when we bought our house seven years ago, I didn’t care that much about what it looked like. I didn’t have a vision for my “dream house,” because I was invested in our life in Manhattan and would rather have spent the money on a bigger apartment. Actually, if I think back, my Barbie Dreamhouse was always the penthouse apartment, not the mansion. I imagined a sprawling loft with floor to ceiling arched windows in SOHO. Not a picket fence. But in order to survive the city, Mike said he needed a place to getaway on the weekends with space and a yard. He also wanted a place less than two hours from the city, with some kind of water access, which limited our options considerably, especially in our price range. (I’m just going to caveat this whole thing by saying, YES. I realize how privileged all of this sounds. If you are starting to roll your eyes at me, I’d stop reading now.)

When we found our house, we loved where it was situated, on a nice piece of land on the tail end of a creek that leads to the Shinnecock Bay, but were not big fans of the house itself. The exterior is 80s modern and very dated. The kitchen and bathrooms have not been updated since the house was built in 1989. Still, the price was right, I liked the interior layout, the yard was gorgeous and everyone said it was a really good deal. Mike really wanted to make it happen, so I said okay. In a way, I agreed to buy the house as a way to preserve our life in the city. Never ever was I moving to the burbs.

We have done quite a few updates to the house since we bought it seven years ago. We’ve redone the exterior siding, relined the pool, replaced the wood deck with composite, converted the attic to a playroom, replaced the roof, redid the landscaping in the front of the house and squared off the rounded chimney (an 80s modern signature). Every update has been either necessary or a major improvement, but it’s also made me realize that the house’s aesthetic will never be exactly what I want it to be. I find myself looking longingly at smaller, simpler, more traditional houses, thinking how easy it would be to switch out some windows and put on a fresh coat of paint to create something fresh and modern, instead of starting with an 80s modern house and trying to walk it back. Each update has also been expensive, and sometimes I feel like every dollar we put into our house takes us one step farther away from getting a house we’d truly love.

I also had no idea how much time we would end up spending at the house (thank you, pandemic) and as a result, how many practical things I would realize the house was missing— like an entranceway so that the front door doesn’t open directly into the living room, a mudroom (please give me somewhere to hide all the shoes, bags and jackets currently littered all over the living room floor), a larger bedroom closet (ours is comically small for two people), and a basement (I need a place to store all the bins of childhood nostalgia my mother has been slowly purging from her house). I guess this is why people have a starter house and then they upgrade, putting a checklist together of everything they’ve learned they need and want.

How did I go from someone who didn’t want a house to someone with a checklist?

Over the past two years, I have had quite a few friends opt out of city life and move to beautiful houses in the suburbs. Houses with very adult foyers, walk-in closets, individual rooms for every child, and FUCKING CRAFT ROOMS. At night, I find myself thinking— do we have this all wrong? Would it make more sense to sell both the apartment and the house and start over? Put real thought into what we’re looking for and get one big beautiful space we’d love inside and out? Something in a neighborhood with other families we know so that Mazzy and Harlow can ride their bikes to their friends’ houses on their own? Or do we keep pouring money into this house, a place we only live part time?

My tiktok “for you page” has become an endless feed of amazing home renovations and decor inspo that I actually had to stop watching because the house envy was slowly driving me crazy. Have you read the article in the Wall Street Journal about Instagram causing depression in young girls because they are fed endless images of unattainable beauty? That’s me with fucking houses. They should do a study on middle aged moms and unattainable McMansions with wrap around porches, perfectly organized pantries and kitchens the size of a small country. Home envy will be my downfall.

Which brings me back to that rotting retaining wall. Sigh. To fix it, it would require another huge investment and one that could arguably make our house look worse, because it meant tearing up all the landscaping in the backyard currently covering the wall to get to the rot underneath. I couldn’t bear to think about it.

Mike loves a project though so he immediately got to work. He hired someone to rip out all of the brush next to the porch, tear out the steps from the yard to the deck, remove all the bushes in the beds on top of the retaining wall and take out the fence.

Then Mike decided he wanted to put an above ground hot tub back there, so he ripped out the overgrown garden on the other side of deck too. Might as well do it all at once.

The retaining wall was completed shortly before the pandemic started, but the rest of the backyard all around the deck was still a huge pile of dirt. This especially sucked because that area had always been my happy place. The garden might have been a mess, but there were wild flowers that grew there in the spring and I had hung a chair on the deck just to sit there and look at them.

Now I had this:

It’s hard to see in the pictures, but the deck comes out on an angle and the house goes in a completely different direction. The sun porch is parallel to the backyard, which is at odds with the house, so the space in front of the deck is a long wonky triangle on a pretty big slope. To make it even more complicated, we’ve got a pool on the deck, so we are required to put a fence around the whole area. When we thought about how to redesign it, there didn’t seem to be any way to bring order to a space that should never have been so oddly shaped to begin with.

And so the dirt pile stuck around for awhile.

Then the pandemic hit and we were living full time at the house, staring at the dirt pile every day. If you are thinking, but wait— I never saw you post anything on Instagram that showed a huge dirt pile in your backyard, YEAH. Just like people crop out the mess in their homes as much as possible, I found creative ways to show my backyard, strategically panning up and around to avoid the dirt.

Then one day, Mike came home from the hardware store with a huge pile of railroad ties and wood. He had decided that he was going to take on the landscaping project himself. I appreciated that he wanted to feel productive while we were at home, but honestly, I just saw him spending money to make a bigger mess. Another thing that we couldn’t easily walk back. I begged him to wait until we could hire a landscape designer, but Mike told me he liked having something to focus on. I sighed and let him. In hindsight, I wish I had properly documented the entire project from beginning to end with video, but I had such low expectations for how it was all going to turn out, I preferred to ignore the endeavor entirely. All of the before pictures I am posting are ones Mike took himself.

Over the course of about a year, Mike was out there measuring the space, digging, and cutting wood for hours every single day. I wasn’t clear on what he was doing at first, but slowly I started to see how he was adding levels to the dirt to deal with the incline and smaller retaining walls to create a tiered effect with separate garden beds. He worked with a stone guy to rebuild the steps down from the deck and dig a path for a separate curved stone staircase down to the hot tub. Together, they added height to the existing retaining wall to better hide the base of the house (which always bothered me), covered the cinder block wall below the porch with stone (which made a huge difference), and then capped each piece of wood with bluestone. Next, Mike built a fence from scratch that matched the color of the house for around the garden. And once the structure was done, he got to work with the plantings. We planted hydrangeas around the deck, large grasses to cover the retaining wall, boxwoods around the hot tub, and all different plants like juniper, lavender and rose bushes in the garden tiers.

When he finished, it looked like this:

No, it isn’t a charming little garden with perfect rows and a pretty fence. Or a minimalistic zen oasis with strategically placed plants and rocks. It’s kinda wonky with weird lines just like our house, but you know what? It looks better than I ever could have imagined. And, I have to hand it to Mike who had the vision. It’s a great solution for the space.

Mike’s Garden makes the hot tub work and the deck look more finished. It adds some much needed natural elements to soften up the composite deck (which I regret). It’s gonna look even better once the plantings grow in and the flowers are in full bloom. And best of all, it’s the perfect view from my chair.

My biggest contribution to the garden was the addition of grass between the steps and the stone work around the hot tub. Originally, I was shot down because irrigating that area would be too difficult and it would die. Then, thanks to all the tiktok I was watching, I saw a faux grass yard renovation and suggested we use turf instead. It worked out brilliantly with the added bonus that you can get in and out of the hot tub without trekking in dirt. I guess Tiktok is good for something!

I’m not sure what a real landscaper would have come up with, but in the end, this was a hell of a lot cheaper and I think I love it more knowing that Mike made it happen.

Same as our house. If Mike hadn’t convinced me it was the right decision to buy it years ago, we would have been stuck in the city during the pandemic. And even though it’s not exactly what I would choose now, I do love this place. The time we spend here is such a gift to my family. And you know what? The weird angles on the exterior are what make the interior spaces so unique and wonderful. Maybe sometimes you have to nurture the house you’re in, rather than covet the houses out of reach.

Our next step is to redo the kitchen (no more cat door in the cabinet!) and the bathrooms. As Mike and I start to talk about it, I get both excited about the potential and nervous about going too far down a path in the wrong direction. Mike assures me that renovating will also help us sell it, if ultimately, we do not want to stay. As someone wise told me recently, no one’s path is set in stone.

In the meantime, I’ve been actively trying to stay off home renovation tiktok. I realized that it’s altering my view of reality and making me think everyone lives in impeccably designed houses that they renovated themselves in 15 seconds! But maybe, just maybe, all those home designers are cropping out their dirt piles too.

And I bet, if I had the foresight to film Mike’s pandemic project from the beginning, it would have made a pretty impressive tiktok.

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