A Day of Yard Work

I was doing some cleanup of the pine needles around my Air Conditioner units to replace it with some mulch (since I know how much snakes love the pine needles - more on that later).. and I was a bit surprised by what I found. Not only were there rocks, there was a whole bunch of construction debris and garbage from when my builder built my home!

Now, this was not the first section of pine needles that I have removed from around my house and replaced with mulch, but this was by far the smallest section, and contained the largest amount of construction trash! I found pieces of brick, sharp metal objects, and even a large pile of mortar that appears to be connected to the brick on the side of my home!

This is quite a ridiculous situation. For "quality building" standards, I would say that this section of my home fails miserably.

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Anyway, I swapped out the pine needles for mulch because we have quite a few snakes that live in the surrounding area of my home. While I was removing the pine needles around a section of my AC units, I scared a baby black snake! ... and it also scared the crap out of me! =0

Thankfully no one was hurt (being primarily concerned for myself), but I hope that the snake doesn't come back to this little section of mulch. I wish that I took a picture of the before & after view .. I only had the forethought to take a picture of the construction debris because I don't know how to safely remove the mortar from the brick on the side of my home and I would like to remove it at some point.

Does anyone here know how to properly remove mortar from brick without damaging the brick? I'm tempted to have the builder come back and remove / fix it, but I'm not sure that they would do anything about it at this point...