Big Plans

A week ago it was 30 degrees outside and snow was everywhere. Today it's 80 degrees! As a matter of fact, after I write this I'm going to go sit out in the backyard and read for awhile to enjoy the beautiful weather. If I get a tan in the process...well, I won't complain!

It's been 80 since Saturday. Needless to say, that means we've done a lot of yardwork this weekend! Our neighbors have been out too. It's so nice to have things back the way they should be. We've talked more to our neighbors this weekend than we have since back in October! I love our little community. We live in a huge neighborhood, but our little section is very friendly and social. We're always out working in our yards (our house and the houses around us have the best looking yards on the street!) and so we talk to each other a lot. I hate that the vehicle traffic is so busy in front of our house, but it's also nice that the pedestrian traffic is busy. We just live in a busy section, I guess that's good and bad. It is sometimes annoying when we're trying to get serious work done and keep getting interupted, but I'd rather that happen than live in a place where nobody talks to each other.

We chopped down the pump (also known as pompous or pampas) grass in our backyard (remember my post on pump grass on my old blog?). It already looks better even though we haven't pulled the roots up yet. It's going to be serious work...we're actually going to have to rent a bobcat to dig them up. We had 10 of them growing in one huge group. UGG! It's bad enough getting rid of one. We also trimmed all of the monkey grass so that it will grow back looking nice and fresh. We're actually planning on getting rid of a lot of it, but we're going to give some to our neighbors and my MIL, so we still trimmed it.

Before:

After: (it will look much better once we get rid of the roots and plant grass there!
We have started designing our new patio for the backyard! Right now the "patio" is awful looking. The people who lived here before (the original owners) must have owned a brick factory or something! There are bricks EVERYWHERE. It's very unorganized and haphazard. We're going to use the same bricks, but we're going to make it look much nicer, like a real patio. We're going to level out the patio area and place the bricks close together. Right now there's all of this white gravel all over the place, so we need to scrape that up and get rid of it. We went around counting bricks yesterday. It was hilarious!! We wandered all over the yard and kept finding more and more bricks, some out in the back of the yard under the trees, some buried in the flowerbeds, some randomly stacked in corners of the yard. We have 102 18"x18" bricks, countless regular sized bricks (at least 300, but we keep discovering more and more buried under plants and stuff, so I imagine we'll find more as we keep working on the flowerbeds), 39 12"x12" bricks, and 17 10"x10". We also have a lot in various other sizes, but we aren't going to use those for the patio. Matt found a software where you can make 3D designs for patios and landscape design so we've planned out most of the patio already. I'm going to try to get a screen shot of our plans when he gets home to show y'all! We still need to design a pattern with the various sized bricks. But before we begin that, we need to pull up the many, many bricks in the backyard and dig up the pump grass. After that we can get to work on our new outdoor space!


The patio as it is now. We haven't moved a single one of those bricks (except those 2 you see placed on top of the large bricks). That's how the previous owner placed them. Including those completely messed up looking ones in the lower left corner! What were these people thinking!?

The view of the patio area from the end of our driveway (obviously this picture was taken last fall, before the leaves fell and we cut down the grass). We just tore down that section of the fence (that separates the driveway from the backyard/patio). We're going to replace it with a much nicer looking privacy fence!

The view of the patio from one of our living room windows. We're going to replace this window with a French door that leads out onto the new patio! Obviously we'll get move the AC unit!



The patio that we're going to build is going to end where those large bricks end. Then all of the rest of those oddly placed bricks and gravel are going to be replaced with nice, neat looking grass!

This is the flowerbed between the patio and the house. We're going to cut down the bushes, move the AC unit, and get rid of the flowerbed altogether. In its place we're going to build a raised flowerbed/benches that run the length of the patio.