Yard Work

Hi there!

Since winter ended back in February-ish for us, there has been a lot of tension between Jeffery and I.

This was caused by many things. He was stressed out at work. I was stressed out about school and the house. He'd come home and be angry that the house was a mess. I was so frustrated with the house that I had given up, and on days I tried to get it clean, I cried and yelled at couch or floor all afternoon.

It was becoming a daily fight between the two of us, and a lot of hurt feelings.

I couldn't keep up with the mud from our backyard. Cleaning the floors was a lost cause with three dogs. When the mud on the floors dried, it would be kicked up and turned into dust that collected on everything from the table to our dishes. It was the stuff of nightmares.

This went on for a while.

Jeffery ended up taking $1000 out of our emergency savings fund.

(His words: Anything that is causing this much stress on our marriage is an emergency.)

Before

(Without the deck.. It was terrible.. We tore it out.)

It should be noted that none of the green is grass.. it's entirely dandelion.

After trying to seed various parts of the yard we decided that sod would be our best option. The yard was just so far gone. We needed to start over. Jeffery spent hours spraying the lawn with weed killer, digging out heavy pavers and cinder blocks, pulling out that terrible deck, and raking rocks and twigs.

Pictured above he's measuring out how much bigger we want the new deck to be than the old one.

Below he's starting the tilling project.

Apparently I didn't get a before picture of this corner. I spent an hour shoveling dirt into that corner so we could put sod there. It used to be a fire pit built into the shelf but we pulled the cinder blocks out and I made a nice gradual hill out of the extra dirt we had laying around. In the picture above you can see where he dug some pavers out. We wanted that pad to be a little narrower so it would be the same size as the future deck. I spent some time shoveling and raking it into a nice gradient.

After Jeffery tilled the yard we took a large landscaping rake and evened out the land as much as we could. Unfortunately the pictures don't show the hills and valleys very well. The yard was like waves rolling onto shore. Imagine a garden and how the rows are a big mound and in between the rows is a valley to walk through.. it was just like that.

You can also see to the left some chicken wire we stapled to the bottom of the fence. Arthas is a wonderful escape artist.. so it's like a baby gate for him. Also on the backside of the yard that shelf has some green. That actually is grass. We tried seed last year.

This picture gives you a good idea of how many bricks were in the yard that Jeffery dug out.

Since seed last year was such a fail Jeffery ordered sod for us to install. (If you ever want to do sod pay for someone else to install it or have many friends who are willing to slave under the hot sun for you. Thankfully we have a great friend who has been featured here several times.)

14.5 tons of grass.

The guy had a really awesome forklift, but unfortunately it was too heavy to get over the hill in front of our house so he just left all of it in our driveway. Our wheelbarrow was so wonderful. But it was a lot of trips and a ton of sweat.

The first six pieces in place.

Now I'm going to show you the before from way back when we first started working on the backyard. Back before we installed the fence. Just so you remember.

(Remember.. none of this is actually grass)

And before the sod was installed. (This picture again)

And after!

Haha, we didn't order enough. Jeffery thought he over estimated. After two nonstop days of work it's kind of disappointing that it isn't completely finished.

A short video for you of the work in progress.

HERE

I took a panorama right before we ran out of sod. The patch isn't as big as pictured.

Before we actually did the backyard we did some work in the front yard. Do you remember the bushes?

Well we pulled them out before they grew leaves. It took not 1 not 2 but 3 shovels to do this work. The lady at Lowes told us she hoped to never see us back with another shovel.

I trimmed them down and Jeffery dug and pulled them out.