Extreme Backyard Renovation!

Our backyard is amazing! It's unrecognizable and now you can actually enjoy spending time outside! It now is truly an outdoor living space.

Flash back a day and a half ago. The yard consisted of weeds and dirt, the ground was covered with hundreds of rotted peaches, trees were literally growing into each other, the trees were so thick and low hung that to walk around the backyard you had to duck, there was clutter everywhere, and it basically just looked like a tornado had blown through it! Blake and I used to never go outside in the backyard because it honestly was just disgusting and not to mention anytime it would rain it was a complete and utter mud pit!

Now onto present day and time, our backyard is now....simply beautiful!

How did we do it do you ask? Step one is I have an amazing mom and dad who volunteered to help us through the whole process. They brought over all the tools we needed, spent countless hours in the 90 degree heat with us doing manual labor, and of course, brought the "know-how". Not to mention how much money they helped us save. Who knows how many thousands of dollars it would have cost to hire people to till all that soil, lay all the grass, cut down the trees, and heavily trim the remaining trees. So there you go, definitely a huge thanks to my mom and dad whom I love very much.

Here's a little play-by-play of how everything went down. Blake and I rented a high horsepower tiller from a tool rental store. My parents came over Friday night to help us get a start on the work so it wouldn't all be left for Saturday. On Friday, Blake spent most the night tilling all the grass and soil, going over the whole backyard 5 or 6 times to really get the soil prepared. Dad went at the trees with a chainsaw. And I mean went at them. There were times when Blake and I would just stop and watch because it was pretty cool to see large trees get chopped up and fall down so quickly. Dad's a pro at this and definitely efficient. Mom and I spent most the night dragging all the tree debris to the alleyway and stacking it into piles.

Saturday morning we got a 6:45 start and got to cracking on finishing tilling the soil and doing a few other jobs. The grass arrived around 8:15, thank God. They don't guarantee a time and said what time you get the grass depends on how the route is for that day. So I guess we were lucky. We spent the next 7 or 8 hours laying all the grass out. Talk about manual labor. Blake kept saying that he "didn't know it would be this much work." Haahaha.

What was pretty depressing was to really be trucking along good laying down squares and to look over and see that you've done about 1/30th of the yard. But we were able to finish it without dying of exhaustion from the heat and labor! The whole time we kept going back and forth on whether we would have enough squares since it's really hard to estimate how much you would need, and believe it or not, we got it almost perfect! We were only about 3 grass squares short, which is unbelievable if you think about it. Kudos to me and Blake for using our prior knowledge of high school math to calculate the square footage in our backyard correctly! 1,960.5 square feet!

Mom and I then went to Lowe's and got 15 bags of mulch to lay out around the trees as well as an area of heavy shrubs in the corner that the dogs love but that turns into mud when it rains. Problem solved! We also got a bunch of large rocks to go in 2 sections of the patio that was previously just dirt which also turned into a mud pit when it rained. Problem solved again! And we also got some really pretty flowers for the patio.

All-in-all, I would say that Blake and I are EXTREMELY happy with the results. Everything turned out so wonderful and we can't say "thank you" enough to my parents for all the help they gave us. We are really going to enjoy spending time out there. We are so proud of our backyard now and are going to make this one of our new hobbies-working in the yard! It will be fun to see what we'll do out there. Blake wants to get a grill so we can have our friends and family over for cookouts, so look for an invitation in the near future! We also think it would be cool to get a fountain with flowing water for the whole peaceful effect. But all in time! For now, we are just as happy as can be! Blake had the nice idea of having a picnic in the backyard tomorrow to celebrate, so that we will!

Check out my Facebook here for the full album of before pictures, as well as action shots.

And here for our "After" album.