A Little Elbow Grease

You know how the best laid plans are usually thwarted?  That is pretty much what has happened to me yesterday.  Between a shipment that isn't going to be here till next week, photos that I thought were taken but weren't,  and a sick baby, this Great Outdoors week has not gotten off to a great start.

 My sister and my husband hard at work.  Don't let Ellie's gloves and shovel fool you and make you think she did all the work.  Her finger was broken and she couldn't get those weeds out.  Just sayin.  :) (love you sis)

I mentioned that we did a lot of work to the flower beds.  We took out all the weeds (it was a TON of work) and planted 8 trees and some other various bushes and plants.  This is where the wrench was thrown into my week.  I thought I had taken photos, but apparently I didn't.  This is what our yard looked like after only half of the trees were planted, and only a few of the flowers or bushes  Since a picture is worth a thousand words.....

We had a dump truck full of dirt delivered to our house to go into the flower beds and garden boxes.  This pile was enormous!  If you look, you can see just how wide it was, and then imagine that it is as tall as my husband.  I only thought to take a picture after he had put all the dirt in the back yard and was on his last wheel barrel full.

I am hoping that I can take some pictures tonight of what everything currently looks like so that I can show you how much it has changed even since these were taken.  It has been a long and hard process, but it is so worth the results!  We still have a long way to go until we can say that everything is done, but we love our yard and are having a great time making plans of what to do in the future!

The Great Outdoors Week

Whew, it's been quiet around here hasn't it?  Usually when it's this quiet, it means that I am in project mode and some awesome things are happening that I can't wait to show you.  This is no exception.  I have some big projects to show you!

This week, as you know, is the Point of View party.  What you might not know is that the theme is Outdoors.  I decided that I would dedicate this whole week to showing you what projects I have going on outside my house.

I haven't really ever shown my yard on this blog.  My husband and I have been hard at work the last couple of summers getting a lot of things done, but we have done a ton the last couple of weeks especially.  Here is what we started with: (no yard.  no sprinklers.  no flower beds.  Just dirt....and weeds.)

Our first investment was enlarging the patio.  We wanted a place that we could BBQ and let the kids play.  Originally all we had was a 10X10 cement slab with some little wooden stairs.  I thought that it would look really nice to have a rounded patio with matching rounded stairs.  I am so glad that I did, because it made a huge difference.  Here is what it looked like while the guys were getting ready to cement it.

The porch is huge now, and is perfect for a little bike riding in the back, or coloring with chalk, or just simply sitting around eating BBQ and enjoying company.  It still needs some fun touches to make it welcoming though.

The next thing we did was install sprinklers.  My husband decided to save some money and do them himself.  (He's so handy)  We had to decide what our yard was going to look like.  Things like where our garden would go, how many flower beds, how big we wanted our shed and where it would go, if we would have a play area for the kids...etc....  It was a long list and we had to know exactly how big we wanted it to be.  I don't know if you know this or not, but that can be dang hard.  Luckily, we figured it out and are really happy with the way it all turned out.

After the sprinklers were installed and ready to go, we flattened everything out, brought in a truckload of top soil, flattened it out all over the yard, and planted our grass seed.

After the grass was planted and had grown, we decided to add curbing around the flower beds.  This is how it sat until a few months ago.  The flower beds were overgrown with weeds and we hadn't put the garden boxes in yet.

That is where I will leave you for today.  I wanted to give you the background work that went into our yard to make it what it is today.  Tomorrow I will show you what some elbow grease and some plants will do for your yard, and I will also show you some fun elements I have added to my yard to give it a little something extra.