Back Yard Work
One of our big projects we planned this year was tackling our back yard. I love the room we have back there, and our covered back porch is AMAZING! However, the flower beds just were not our cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, if this is your thing, great. It just isn’t ours. I would MUCH rather have that space for Melody to run free, and we plan to eventually use that space for a grilling area. Well since we have been home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had the time to really devote to doing things all around the house. And that includes our backyard! LOTS of pictures ahead!
I am going to try and break this all down into the “smaller” projects we did to get the yard to almost where we want it. We do have projects left to go, but we are done for the year (we hope!).
Before
Below you will find true, true before pictures. Like before we lived here, ha! I literally went on Zillow and screenshot these. You will see two very flower filled areas around our porch. The previous owners did take a lot of the decorative stuff with them as you will notice in other pictures to come. There were also three other flower beds throughout the backyard. The other three were no where near as big, but we didn’t want any of this to stay.
Now you can see the best "before” pictures I took. You don’t get the entire picture here. Just the water issues we were also having with these flower beds.
Back Porch
I am not going to go into much detail about this since I did a post dedicated to our back porch already, but I did want to share some photos since you can see the flower beds within these pictures. I also added a picture of our updated fan we changed after removing the flower beds. We did this back in February.
Removal of the Flower Beds
So I didn’t think to take pictures of Brad and my dad removing all of these bushes, but I do have some incredible after pictures. Brad removed all of the decorative stuff and the smaller plants by himself. He and my dad used my dad’s truck to pull up all of the rose bushes and a few of the larger plants. They also re-worked the drainage pipes, and we did use some of the stones to layout a new, much smaller flower bed up against the house. You can also see two piles from this. One is a lot of the plants Brad pulled up. My dad did take some with him to replant at their house. The other is all of the decorative stuff we had leftover. Brad had a coworker that took some while my family took most of the rest.
Pressure Washing
So this is minor in the grand scheme of things, but man did it make a difference in person. We pressure washed the brick on the bottom that was covered with dirt and such from all the plants. We also pressure washed the patio furniture and patio.
Flower Beds
So I know some think we are crazy to do all that work then put back a flower bed, but it was DRAMATICALLY smaller! Like the size of one of the small beds. It only lined one side of the porch. We planted two azalea bushes and some impantients. Easy to maintain and pretty.
Sod
We opted for sod over seeds for immediate satisfaction. We contacted a local nursery who delivered three pallets of sod. I think we still need one more next year for a bed we removed AFTER we laid the sod, and we also have some patchy areas throughout the yard. The sod took a day to lay (we started on a Thursday evening and finished at lunch on Friday). It has done exceptionally well so far and is really green!
Swing Set/All Done!
So the last thing we added was a swing set to our back yard. This is an early birthday present for Melody that we are so excited to have. We wanted to do this sooner, but we knew our previous house wasn’t long term (and we didn’t want to move it). And we really wanted it to be a gift and not something we just did. So now that we have added it, I took some final pictures of this yesterday! The yard has turned out so much bigger than it seemed when we first moved in, and I love all the work we have been able to do these last few months.
Like I said above, we do want to do some more sod next year in a few spots, and we also eventually want to add a grilling area to the side of our patio. And one day in the far future we hope to screen in our patio too!
