The Holbrook House

We had taken a number of walks in the back along the property with my Mom, Dad, and Gorette in the first month of ownership. We found a wood structure, an axel from a 30’s chevy, and trash from the past decades. It was thick and in some places you could not walk through and we tried to determine what it would be like as a yard. 

It wasn’t always that way. When the Mills family lived here it was a nice open back yard. And a few pictures gave me vision.

I wanted to start to clear behind the barn which was not accessible so I looked into getting a burn permit, a good chain saw, and some extra hands. We burned 3 weekends in a row and went from clearing behind the barn to 6-7 ridiculously large bonfires and stopped at the row of pines leaving a wooded buffer in the back yard. It was a ton of work!

Pete, Lombardo, Faraz, Dad and I cut and dragged countless trees and limbs. We must have dropped 20 large trees. Many held together by vines which had been lifted over the years by young trees into the canopy. They were really hard to deal with many 2-4 Inches thick you could literally swing from! We cut up the trunks an started to stack the wood while burning the clippings. The yard started to open little by little. It was deceiving thinking you could do more in a day than what was realistically possible.

Each night I was constantly going outside running the hose as many of the piles would start glowing bright orange long after they were put out. The yard after 3 weekends of hard labor and poison ivy (no we do think we burned any) looked like a waste land of debris and stumps nothing like a lawn but it was big and open. 

I was at the Cape with Johnny Catalano and talking about the yard. He told me that the next steps were best left for him and that he had an excavator, couple bobcats, and a dump truck. During this time we had excavation in full swing in the front yard so to give you scale of my big dig we had total 3 excavators, 4 bobcats, 2 dump trucks, and a Mack sized large dump tuck and a bunch of equipment trailers on the property at one time. It was really insane! Half was John’s and half was the septic installation that was simultaneously occurring. 

This was the second time I got to work with John Catalano and he was a machine in his own right. That man dug up the 20 stumps and removed them, distributed and leveled 3-4 huge truck loads of loom.

I got to learn how to run a bobcat and before I knew it I had a very level and larger than anticipated back yard. John crushed this project and was a one man rodeo in the bobcat. Flat, level, and filled no more stumps, no more wasteland and no more woods. And when we finished no more Jack Daniels.

We even opened up the original road to the left of the driveway so you can drive behind the barn which makes access to the property ideal for high scale projects (like I do any of those). I bought 10 hoses timers, bags of grass seed, fertilizer and started the process of making my dirt patch a lawn.

I can recall the first days I saw Gorette and Kennedy out there and it was a real treat given all the work to see such a transformation. Mia and the girls have a yard to run and play.