If you know me- you know how much I love yard work! And if you know Russell- well you know he is even less excited about it than me. I want to have a beautiful yard, but it's just SO much work! I will say it is nice when all is said and done, it's just getting their that sucks. Our poor yard is such a work in progress and after being in our house for 3 years we are finally making some headway :) It's definitely better than how it was when we bought the house. I do think sometimes it would have been easier to start with a clean slate than to fix someone else's stuff- but we have done what we could with what we have.
Last spring when we went to turn on our water main to the sprinklers we discovered we had a leak. It was fine if the water was running but once you shut it off you could hear it leaking. We decided to let it go for the summer but that once fall came and we were ready to shut it off we would then replace the stop & waste valve. Russell was awesome and took the job of digging the 7 feet down into the lawn in order to find the valve. We could not believe how far down it was! So for several days we had a large hole in the front yard.
Of course the hole was smack dab in the middle of the yard. People were funny- they kept asking if were planting a tree or something? Uh yes- right in the middle of the yard people :)
Our neighbor helped Russell replace the valve and then Russell filled the hole back in. We waiting during the winter for the dirt to settle and finally we put some sod down to fill it in. It looks SO much better now that there is grass there! Now we just have to keep it green :)
We also replaced a dead pear tree that was in our back yard. I figured it was dead when it didn't lose it leaves in the fall and still had the same ones come spring. Jill and Jerome got the same kind of tree at the same time that we did and theirs is a dud too- so at least we know we didn't kill it!
The dead tree is on the left and the new tree is waiting to be planted. You can see at the bottom of the dead tree a bunch of starts- but who wants to wait for those to grow? :)
Russell with our new tree- he insists on wearing his hat even at 8 at night! ha ha
Even though the backyard still needs some major help, we have managed (with help from Jill and my mother) to get the front yard looking pretty decent- thanks you guys!!
Our newest project has been building grow boxes for our garden. We decided this was the best choice because the ground in our yard is hard as a rock and therefore digging a garden would be impossible. So we set out to Home Depot with our list and the plan to spend around a $100 total for the wood, seeds and soaker hoses. We rounded up all our supplies and got our wood cut to size and went to check out. Much to our surprise, the wood we had selected (which we thought was only $10 a board) turned out to be $27 a board! And we had four of them! (yes- that's an extra 68 dollars we hadn't planned on) Good thing we already had them cut and couldn't return them. I was dying! Russell and I couldn't believe it. We just kept laughing because we were so mad at ourselves for looking at the wrong price. This is one expensive garden! I will be even more mad now if what we plant doesn't grow.
I didn't have the heart to tell Russell that when I was looking on line a few days after building these I discovered that according to Martha Stewart (the expert on EVERYTHING)- we shouldn't have used pre-treated wood! Now she tells us! Wish us luck :)
