Yard Progress

We have put in a lot of time cleaning up our mess of a backyard and you can finally see some progress being made, even though we have a lot more work to go. You can find some of before and progress pictures her: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2224747&id=18304404&l=cde4d136ce.

I'm ready to have the yard finished, so I have been trying to spend as much time as possible cleaning. Brice isn't quite as motivated, but he did spend some time out there with me this afternoon. I think my motivation is to just get everything done so that we can get to a point where all the major projects are done and we can relax.

We finished taking out the half wall on the patio, it really opened it up and made it seem bigger.

Some of the "damage" from today. I went to town on some over grown shrubs. I still need to tackle the sage. We get trash picked up once a week, and everything has to fit inside a can that we roll out to the street, so we will slowly be getting rid of the bags. We typically only have one bag of household trash, so we can usually throw out 3 or 4 bags from the yard. This area had some large flowering perennials, that I trimmed back to the grown. There are new ones sprouting up. I dug out a few of these in another section and they have a pretty nasty root system. I'm not really sure what they are, but they have really pretty yellow flowers in September, but I think they can be pretty invasive, so I want to be sure they don't get out of control

I really should invest in a wheelbarrow. These are rocks that were randomly thrown around the yard. I still have a lot more to move. I have a 5 gallons bucket that I've been using to move the rocks. We plan to use some of these once we get every cleaned up and stat putting it back together again. I set up my stereo that I got for Christmas back in high school in our shed and pull the speakers when I'm working in the yard. It makes it a lot better having music to listen to. Here's a view were you can definitely see progress. We (I) removed a flower bed, some shrubs, and random rocks. I still have more rocks to move, before I can finish removing the shrub, but I ran into fire ants and decided I'd move on to another area. The willow still needs more trimming. We are still planning on adding a small area of grass in the yard, but have to finish the cleaning first.