Our Wild Backyard Progress

Hello and happy Tuesday everyone!  I hope you all had great weekends.  Ours was both fun and productive which are the best kinds of weekends, wouldn’t you agree?

Our  backyard is an area that we’ve struggled with since day 1.  I wish I had snapped a picture of what the yard looked like when we first purchased our house because it was down right HORIFFYING!  With weeds as tall as me, it was seriously the most out of control yard I have ever seen.   

In fact it was so bad that our insurance company told us that if we didn’t do something about the fire hazard we called a backyard within 30 days they would drop our policy.

Since we were busy painting every square inch inside the house we just cut the weeds down to the ground and called it good.  By the following Spring it already looked like this.

Those weeds weren’t going down without a fight.  I finally could appreciate the phrase “growing like a weed!” 

It’s crazy how fast these things popped back up.

The raised flower bed at the back had some wood planters that were falling apart.

And although that space was probably once filled with beautiful flowers it had become super overgrown and filled with weeds.

The side section of the yard was filled with rocks that had also become overgrown with weeds.

We did absolutely nothing our second summer in our house since I was pregnant with Lucas, but last year I finally got my butt in gear!

I didn’t take a good picture of anything so I dug through my old pictures from last summer and found a few where you can kind of see our yard in the background!

I began by tearing out that entire section up top and covered it with landscape fabric and mulch. 

And yes that IS grass on the ground!  We thought about trying to seed ourselves since it’s such a small space but in the end we decided that our sanity was worth paying to have it professionally sodded.  But do you notice that it was already browning in some spots?  I’ll get to that in a second.

As for the rock area on the side, I weeded as much as possible by hand and then laid landscaping fabric and mulch right on top to create a little play area for the kids.

It seemed like we had made a lot of progress until the end of the summer when the grass started to die.  This is what the yard looked like earlier this year on Easter.

Whomp whomp.

We tried to rake the dead grass out so that we could lay some seed but were disappointed to see that the sod was coming up by the roll.  It was as if it had never actually taken to the ground. 

So the hubby called up the company that installed it and they were awesome enough to come out and replace the entire yard for us.  Hooray for a great customer service!!

If you follow me on Instagram you may have noticed that we got something that I have been wanting  for ages–a gazebo!

I’ve had my eyes out for one but they were all just soooo pricey.  Then one day while we were at King Soopers of all places, I found this one on sale for $130 which was such a great deal that I just couldn’t pass it up!

Our yard faces West so the amount of sun that we receive in the afternoon and early evening used to make it unbearable to be outside.  Now that we have the gazebo we can actually enjoy eating outside.

I also built some new planter boxes and planted a few perennials in them.  I have a notorious black thumb so hopefully I can keep these guys alive for a while!

They were super easy to build and I’ll be sharing the details on them later this week.

The side of the patio was once another weed breeding ground…

I covered it with mulch and a few paver stones that I found buried under all of the weeds in the raised flower bed.  It’s now the perfect little path!

My favorite time to be out here is at night. 

The warm glow from the string lights is so pretty and I feel like I’m sitting in someone else’s backyard.  It’s just so unreal that this is OUR yard!

There’s still plenty of work to be done but I am so stinking excited with how far it has come!

One more look at the before and after:

Such a difference!  Here is what I have left on the list:

• Find an outdoor rug
• Plant flowers in the window boxes
• Plant some bushes in the raised flower bed
• Find a bench to replace our broken Adirondack chairs
• DIY built in for the barbeque
• Build tree rings

For now I am more than thrilled to spend our summer days and nights out here!

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