Our Backyard Transformation

Hey there everyone,  I am sitting here on my couch just relaxing from a long day in the yard.  My hubby and I have been busy busy beavers working in our yard putting the final touches to our backyard oasis.  We have been in our first house since July 2007 and we have been working on the back yard slowly but surely.  Here is a picture of our house the day we got the keys to our home. (Can you see the burnt front lawn???  YUCK!)

Hubby and I were the first people to live in this house although, we weren't the first owners (ya I know weird, right?... it's a long story).  The house was left sitting empty for 9 months before we bought it and no one really maintained the lawn.  When we were looking for houses we fell in love with this house and didn't think the yard would be a big deal, we learnt quickly!  Shortly after moving in, we realized this crazy out of control lawn was going to be a problem!  I can remember, almost 4 years ago, on what felt like the hottest day of the summer, working for hours on the wheat field yard.  We raked all the dead grass, filled 4+ yard waste bags with dead grass, oh, and then we mowed the lawn with our environmentally friendly push mower which didn't have a bag to catch the clippings, so we had to rake again cause we didn't want the remaining grass to choke and kill what grass we had left.  This is what it looked like at the end of a hard day of work... lovely BURNT grass! Did I mention that we don't have a large yard it's 30ft x30ft tee hee hee, regardless it was a lot of work!

This experience was not really what we had in mind when we bought our first home, we've now learnt our lesson and if we every decide to move we will know that the state of the lawn is IMPORTANT!

The next summer we still struggled with the lawn, it did get green but still unhealthy and we had lots of weeds.  Although we wanted to focus on the grass the neighbours were more interested in putting up a fence so, we jumped on the bandwagon and got a fence built, putting the plan for our lawn on the back burner.  Um???  I don't seem to have a picture of the fence being built, oh well you'll see it in the next step.

The following summer we were able to get back on track and actually planned the big picture for our backyard oasis, it's taken a few years to achieve our goal but check back tomorrow to see the next steps and the finished backyard oasis.