Backyard

So when we first saw this house we were in love with everything...except the backyard.  Luckily we were were able to see the backyard as something we could fix in the future.  I think I hated it more than Richard so I was really pushing for us to do it and this weekend we did!  HURRAY!

So about 2/3 of our yard (the section around the tree) was ivy and I HATED it for multiple reasons:

-UGLY

-Not kid friendly, what kid wants to play in ivy?

-Who knows what is living in there...snakes, rodents, etc.

-Really made the usable backyard very small

So this weekend we worked HARD!  We all got up when Soren did (usually one of us gets to sleep in) and headed to Home Depot to rent a Rotatiller and buy our sod.  We had to get the rotatiller back to Home Depot in 4 hours if we didn't want to pay extra for keeping it longer so we headed home and unloaded the sod so we could get the truck back with in 75 minutes.  After we unloaded the sod Richard headed back with the truck (we left our car there so we wouldn't both have to go) and I got to work taking all of the paving stones out.  Oh, we had taken the big paving stones out before Richard left and there were all of the snakes, we found NINE!  GROSS!  One of the many reasons I am so glad the ivy is gone.

Anyway, after Richard got back he mowed the ivy down then started working with the rotatiller.  We spent A Lot of time cleaning that thing out, the ivy getting all wound up in there was a mess!  But it worked really well!  Richard would till until it was all full of ivy and then he would mow the ivy down while I worked on cleaning the rotatiller, this process was repeated several times.

(Oh, in case you are wondering where Soren was during all of this...he was happily wandering around on the deck, playing in his little pool, eating lunch and watching Blue's Clues.  He was a TROOPER, but you could tell he was feeling pretty neglected.  :(  But he did awesome and he will love having all of that grass instead of the ivy!)

After we finished with the rotatiller Richard took it back while I put Soren down for his nap.  Then we ate lunch and got back to work.  It only took us about 30 minutes to lay the sod, so that was great!

At 4pm we took a break (remember we started at 8am!) to go to a friend's first birthday party.  It was a great break and we had a lot of fun chatting and eating DELICIOUS food!

After the party it was back to work.  We were mostly done, but we had one small section left to sod and then we had to do all of the clean up.

It was a LONG and EXHAUSTING day, but it was so worth it!

Before

Gives you an idea of what Soren was doing all day...

Hard at work with the tiller

Piles of ivy to be bagged up.  It doesn't look like a ton, but we filled two bags and mowed a lot of it down.

After tilling

ALL DONE!!!!