Lessons from the home improvement hamster wheel

On hand shoveling 7 tons of dirt.

May 06, 2025

Last Monday, a dump truck filled with 5 cubic yards of soil and mulch backed into our narrow driveway and couldn’t quite squeeze through to our back garden. Indeed, the truck driver put it best when he bluntly said, “I’m going to hit your house and take out your neighbor’s tree…” Instead of doing that, he dumped the truck’s heavy load right at the bottom of the driveway, leaving us to shovel our way out of the earthy siege we’d been laid under. No cars in or out until the dirt was moved.

At first, my husband and I thought we could simply drag the dirt by its underlaid blue tarp. About 0.2 seconds into that effort, we realized our strength was no match for the mound. Doing some back of the napkin math, I calculated the estimated weight of the dirt to be about 7,000 lbs (7 tons). It was a laugh-out-loud vision that we could move the dirt en masse. «Why is weight so hard to eyeball?!»

Instead, we shoveled.

All in all, it took 2.5 days of pure muscle and grit to move the mound via a wheelbarrow and shovel from our front yard to the shiny new peacock blue raised bed assembled out back. Of course, the walls of the garden bed were just a little too tall for our neighbor’s wheelbarrow to dump its contents over the edge. Rather, we needed to tediously shovel the dirt into the wheelbarrow, wheel it back 50 feet to the garden, then re-shovel it into the raised bed, scoop by scoop.

I skipped my Substack post for the week. The dirt became my whole personality.

I proudly wore a film of sunscreen, sweat, and soil to daycare pickup. My bones and muscles ached from their newfound use and my legs became littered in technicolored bruises. The physicality of the work, the singularity of focusing all day on one mammoth task, it all felt great.

Mentally, I did find myself spiraling, however. Because the dirt pile blocking the driveway debacle is just the latest in a string of Lucy-induced “home improvement” screw-ups.

It feels like every time we need to fix something or I push for a home “upgrade”, we end up in a dirt pile-esque situation: creating a new problem for ourselves, out of which we must urgently (and often expensively) dig dig dig.

As I type this, a nice man named Rocco is downstairs in our basement reassembling our walls and cutting trim to piece the finished portion of our basement back together after some very pricey waterproofing work.

The waterproofing itself meant opening up our paneled basement walls and tearing down 1/8th of a custom built-in bar and bookshelf from the 1940s, temporarily pulling up the carpet, etc.

Rocco is making like all the kings horses and all the kings men downstairs, trying to put ole’ Humpty Dumpty back together again. But, while the walls were open, things spiraled, of course.