Progress on the Yard

When we first moved into our new house, the yard was a mess.  Actually, the yard is still a mess.  But we are making some slow but significant progress.  Allow me to show you with a few, somewhat not great pictures.  I really wish I'd been better at doing the before and after photos thing.


This is a picture of the back of our house.  If I may direct your attention to the actual yard portion of the picture, you can see a couple of things.  First of all, we're not sure which owner previous to us did this, but there used to be an above-ground pool in this backyard, and when it was removed, they didn't bother to remove all the gravel and plastic sheeting that surrounded it and replace it with something like, I don't know, GRASS.  You will also note that at the back of the garage there is a garden with shrubs that is looking very, very overgrown, and way at the back corner of the house is also another garden that is very overgrown.

 This is the view looking from the deck out to the back of our yard.  Believe it or not, this is actually somewhat of an "after" picture -- okay, more like a "work in progress" picture.  I'll get you an actual "how it looks currently" picture in a minute.  The fence-line of our yard was basically a long row of trees and shrubs.  There was actually a cedar hedge here that had completely overgrown and then died.  Tim could actually rip the stumps out of the ground with little to no effort.  Here, you see my studly husband in action using a chain saw to cut down one of many trees that have been removed from back there.

Here's the "what it looks like now" picture.  Please excuse the toys.  There's still a lot of trees back there, but clearly, we've removed a lot.

Here is a shot of Tim in action again, as well as his friend Tak who gave him a hand for a few days.  At this point, they have removed all the gravel and plastic sheeting from where the pool was, and they rented a roto-tiller for a few hours to plow the area under.  Behind them, you can see our garden along the fence.  This picture was taken early in the spring before anything had much of a chance to grow, but let me assure you, I fight a constant battle to keep the overgrowth at bay.  ...but that's a post for another day...

 

Here's a view from the deck of the area where they are roto-tillering. 

Unfortunately, since they've roto-tillered, we haven't had a chance to plant any grass or make a whole lot of progress, mainly because of this massive pile of brush that came from all the stuff we've chopped down or ripped out of the gardens.

The brush is accompanied by a large dead tree, and we are waiting for the tree guy to come chop down the tree and remove the pile of brush for us.  We called him a couple of weeks ago, and we're starting to get a little anxious for him to come so we can get some more work done.

Anyway, that's the yard progress that we've made so far.  Tomorrow I'll show you the progress I've made on the gardens so far...