Yard work

Our yard needs some major love - especially the back yard! Saturday, Tim and Leann came over and helped do some things that really needed to be done - the biggest thing? They hauled off the dog fence that I tore down LAST SUMMER! It was this awful chain link fence that housed the dog before we bought the house and it was always incredibly ugly. One day during football last year, I took it down. It wasn't easy but it looked so much better once it was down. The problem was hauling it off...you see, we don't have a truck so getting it to the dump was an obstacle. And honestly Trey wasn't overly volunteering to get it out of the back yard so it sat there for months. I digress - Tim and Leann took that to the dump as well as some other trash that was in the back yard and also those hideous mirrors that I took down from my bathrooms. I cannot tell you how thankful I was to have this stuff taken off! So after that, Tim fixed our fence on both sides so that they weren't broken anymore. We are supposed to have two functional gate doors but both of them were broken by our dogs (before the kids). They have been broken now for almost 3 years...that's embarassing. So tim fixed those. We decided to leave one unfunctional so it is closed shut. That means I only have one gate to worry about the kids getting in and out. So he fixed our broken door and now it is functional. After that we raked the back yard and bagged some of the leaves until I ran out of trash bags. So on Sunday after church I bagged another 20 bags of leaves (and probably have 40-50 more to go) and then the major work began. I had to dig up a bunch of sod for the stepping stone layout and then I had to rake it all and make the ground level. Sounds easy enough but it took several hours just to do this - not to mention the hours I spent bagging up leaves/pinestraw. I had some other odds and ends that I did yesterday but it's not worth getting in to the little details. I just wish this was all done! But anyhow - thanks to Tim and Leann for their hard work. We are making progress!

This really isn't an accurate "before" picture - this was after we raked all of the gravel, leaves and pinestraw away (which probably took 2-3 hours)
Okay, this is the "after" on Sunday once I spent about 2 hours raking it level and putting down this black stuff that BETTER keep the weeds out over the next couple of years. We are going to be adding some plants on both sides (and much on the left is actually garbage - just waiting for trash to come this tuesday). And then we will be filling in with mulch. I also have to go back and get more stepping stones - only 8 fit in the buggy at lowes and they were so heavy I just figured two trips would be easier.
This was actually after a couple of hours of work so again, not truly a "before" picture. I had at this point cut out the sod to have this curved shape which was going to allow for patio stones to go up to the deck with the brick pavers (that were here when we bought the house)
I realized on Sunday that I had not removed enough sod - my curve wasn't wide enough. So I dug up more sod to have the wide enough curve, laid down the weed stuff (which I am not finished obviously - 3' x 100' WASN'T ENOUGH). So hopefully in the next week or two I will be able to finish. Trey is out of town this weekend and we have an out of town birthday party so I'm not sure anything will get done. We have much more work to do in the back yard and I will try to keep you posted on the progress.