Brecksville's Handy Homeowner: The Lazy Days of Summer

This time of year, I start slacking more than usual on the lawn chores. Who wants to push a mower when it’s 90 degrees out? Especially since the self-propelled mechanism on mine is broken. 

Pushing the thing reminds me of when I was a teenager and my dad would have me cut the grass with a mower that I believe he picked out of someone’s tree lawn on trash day. It weighed roughly as much as cars of the early 1970s did. It was approximately as loud as a jackhammer and it left lumps of grass clippings all over the lawn --which were fun to throw at unsuspecting siblings, incidentally. And I was the mechanism that propelled it. 

That was also in the time before leaf blowers and weed trimmers, when we actually used clippers and brooms and rakes. No wonder I was in such good shape. I think the standards were different then, too. Weeds were just part of the lawn and fences had tufts of tall grass that grew at their bases.

I do have tufts of grass growing at the base of the trees in my yard. But according the the City of Brecksville’s Code of Ordinances, it shouldn’t be more than 10 inches high, as stated on the Building Department’s website.

I decided to visit the , where our Code of Ordinances is made available to the public. Here are a few things that I learned about the ordinances for property maintenance in Brecksville:

• Property must be well maintained to prevent diminishing the property values of the neighborhood.
• Lawns, hedges and bushes should not be overgrown and unsightly.
• Dead tree limbs should be removed for safety.
• Vehicles for sale must not be parked on the lawn or the street.
• The exteriors of homes and sheds should be kept in good repair.

I’ve always been a “live-and-let-live” type of person, but I like living in a community like Brecksville, where people take care of their homes and yards. I guess I should get off of my proverbial hammock and fire up that lawnmower. Maybe after one more glass of lemonade.