Greening Up the Green House
August 3, 2016
We’ve spent a lot of time moving sprinklers around lately in an attempt bring some green to the yard of our little flip.
Man, when I look at the pictures it doesn’t look like much, but it feels like much.
You might remember we had some trees taken down in the back yard. Last time I showed you the yard it looked like this:
To save money we decided to dispose of all those limbs by ourselves. Ugh, I am sweaty and sore and scratched up all over just thinking about it. I think by the end Bruce was even sick of running the chainsaw (which is saying something). Goshen helped us out, though. The city has a free dial-a-trailer program for brush. So we dialed. And dialed. I believe it took EIGHT different trailers (you get one dropped around 2 pm and they pick it up early the next morning and dispose of it for you – for free!). Pretty sure the nice city lady knew my name and address as soon as she heard my voice after the first couple of calls. This meant we had eight evenings where between 2 pm and 6 pm we had to load that trailer.
Then we had the stumps ground out. This left us with piles of “mulch” in the back yard that had to be moved before the patio could be poured. So we decided to spread them around several of the trees that had no grass anyway. Don’t worry, tree lovers, we stayed away from the root systems at the base of the trees. This stuff is full of dirt so it will serve as a base layer, and then we’ll do a top layer of mulch and eventually get some hastas planted around the trees.
Of course we needed something to hold all that mulch in place, so we decided to go with the affordable black plastic edging. Is this what we’d use on our own property? Nope. This was definitely a decision made based on cost – trying to stay economical with our ending.
We got that done and wiped our brows, only to have the concrete guys come whirling in and putting in our patio (in one day!). This left us with new piles of root-filled soil all over the back yard, so we had to rake through all of that and remove a lot of roots and old concrete chuks.
Once that was cleared out we got the yard graded around the patio, tilled the entire yard, and planted grass seed.
Now we’ve got grass seed to grow so we’re out there babying it with water every day. We’ve been so good about watering that the city flagged the house for abnormally high consumption and called us to make sure everything was ok at the property.
We haven’t planted any landscaping yet (or added that pretty top layer of mulch) because we’ve decided to get the house resided, and we anticipate that guys tromping all around re-siding might accidentally squash those pretty plants. So we’re waiting on that.
The new garage door is on, however, and on the back of the house we replaced the junky old door with a new exterior door:
So we’re making progress. I don’t think anyone driving past would really even notice changes yet, but they’re all steps in the process.