Unfortunately we forgot to get "before" pictures of the backyard...but if you can imagine our deck extending out to a wonderful landscape of...WEEDS... ground cover, bind weeds, thistle, dandelions, you name it, we have it. So Tim started our summer fun by spraying the entire yard with herbicide to "start from scratch" (as you will soon see, this does not exist entirely when you are talking weeds). Below is a picture of our front lawn... you get the idea...
Then, we laid out where our grass would go and placed rocks along the edge (bonus of buying an old house, we had all the rock in other areas of our lot that we needed to do this edge). Then, Tim painstakingly tilled the ground, brought in manure, tilled some more, then he flattened the whole lot to a smooth finish, beautiful. We were ready to plant seed (why put ourselves through the fun of seeding a lawn? Well, I could give a mumbo jumbo answer about choosing a Colorado friendly grass that is not available in sod, but really, we're poor). We were all ready to go on a Thursday about a month ago, and on Friday a tree trimming company Tim had called a couple weeks ago showed up (unexpected, let me add, they said they would call but didn't) with 10 yards of wood chips that Tim hurridly told them to dump in behind our house. So the weekend began :) Tim's parents and my family helped tremendously with the following projects, but it was still a ton of work. The swingset (another added bonus of our foreclosure acquire) was originally placed about 4 feet from the side fence and was attached to the "tree house" in the very back corner of our lot. We moved the swingset out and turned it and fixed some of the broken/splitting wood. We fought with an out-of-control grapevine that was beginning to climb into my crabapple tree and choke some of the branches and removed all of it beside the stump (in the process we revealed a very sad little lilac...I am trying to bring it back and make it pretty). We spread all of the 10 yards of wood chips everywhere besides the grass area, which involved some regrading work on the west side of our house. Tim also got the grass seed planted (after re-flattening the lawn due to a major rain storm, see below). Tim and his Dad also began work on a fence from the garage to the house. This all took place in the span of just a couple weeks, and things seemed to be going very well. And then there was rain...
We haven't had a really wet spring in a quite some years, and this spring has been particularly wet and late. With that we have had some rain storms here that DUMPED rain on our beautiful new yard and revealed a drainage issue...okay more like a pond off our back stairs and down the sidewalk. After all our work, it became obvious that it would keep getting washed into ugliness if we did not address the problem, so instead of finishing the fence, Tim started to plan how we would clean this up. This required pulling up the flagstone walkway to our driveway, and painstakingly removing the landscaping rock that occupies the corner between our house, back deck, and driveway. We can't afford to buy all new rock, so Tim has been sifting it, and dumping it in water to clean out the leftover woodchips that were hurridly dumped on top. He at some point this week discovered that one of the fence posts was getting a little loose (not good considering it is one of the gate posts), so he dug a trench to put in a stabilizing bar, and discovered that water dripping off the garage was collecting around that post, so he decided that we needed to add a french drain along the side of the diveway to drain this area. We got this project going...and lo and behold another fun surprise develops. There is an old concrete slab under our asphault driveway that has likely settled over the years and now runs downhill right into the corner of our foundation. This hasn't seemed to cause any issues to this point, but that corner is where we were planning on running the drainage from our yard...and that means more water would settle down, hit the slab, and run right into our foundation. So add building a concrete grade/gutter around the side of our house to our growing To Do list. Meanwhile, we finished the french drain and stabilized the fence, all so that we could cover it all back up and make it look like nothing ever happened. Instead, we took a picture to document the large amount of ground work we accomplished this weekend.
Needless to say, we still have to remove/sift the remaining rock, add the drainage for the yard (and the grading/gutter at the corner of the house), replace the rock, replace the flagstone walkway, and finish the fence. Then we will be back to where we "thought" we would be by now.
We are very excited to see our grass finally sprouting (it didn't all wash away)! Now, those weeds we "killed" are beginning to sprout also so we get to go through and pull the biggish one to keep them from getting out of control until our grass is established enough to use some weed spray. See our pretty little grass sprouts:
All this fun for our simple backyard landscapping project...I can only imagine what's to come with the front yard, and we haven't even gotten to the inside yet. Oh yeah, and a new baby should be joining us in just a few months. I have to say though, it is still all worth it to be in not just our house, but our home.
