Backyard Makeover

When we bought our new house the back yard, smack dab in the middle of the grass, looked like this:

Now I love roses and all, but an overgrown rose bush in the middle of the yard is not very 2 year old friendly. And the two random mini pine trees – yeah those have to go too. We are pretty much going to be taking out all of the random plants in the yard and taking all the landscaping bark out and putting up a mini retaining wall around that area and filling it with pea gravel. All of the boys play equipment will go there. It’s perfect because I can see it from the house with the huge windows in the living and dining room. Friday after Landon’s nap we went outside and whacked away at the overgrowth and cut down a ton (I cut down, Landon chased the dog with the leaves…) until Riley woke up from his nap. I’m pretty surprised on how much we got done in about an hour:

After Brad got home from work we all went back out after dinner and worked some more on clearing it all out. We got so much accomplished.

Saturday we finished hacking away at the overgrowth an pulled all of the branches away to the side of the house to die some before putting them in the trash to be taken away. The next weekend we cleaned up all of the bark and plastic that was under it. We had to fill a huge hole in the center of the area that looked like they used to have a tree that they dug up. The vines on the back of the fence were so over grown it was a bear to get them all up. We would cut vine after vine and think we had them all but when we went to pull on it to get it loose there was still more. 

Such focus and determination