Back Yard Fun

Our backyard looks like a mess this summer. (Sorry to my neighbors that have to look at it!) We hope to get this under control soon.

Here's what's going on so far,

First, we have huge weeds (trees?!) growing up the side of the house. These need to be removed because they are causing moisture to get on and into the walls of our house. The weeds are taking over the back and both sides of the house.

I've been digging and hoeing for several weeks now. We marked off 2 feet away from the house. Everything inside that 2 feet is being removed.

Much better!!!

When I'm done digging and hoeing we will lay weed barrier stuff and top it off with a layer of pea gravel or rocks.


Also, I decided to remove the brick pathway by our back door. The previous homeowners put this brick down years ago, and it's just a mess with weeds and grass growing up between the bricks. For the last few years I have had to weed my brick pathway several times each summer to make it look nice, but this year I decided I am tired of weeding my bricks.

So I dug all of the bricks and the weeds out

This old concrete stepping stone was under the bricks!

I had a lot of bricks and stepping stones to remove

And now the area just off the screened porch looks like this.
Timmy needs to get the siding put back on our house before winter. It looks pretty junky out there right now.

Next, it was time to tackle the flowerbed to the right of the back door. The weeds here were out of control too! There was nothing but dirt in this flowerbed last May. These all grew like this over our dry summer. How do they grow and grow when everything else died??

My oldest son Allen removed most of the weeds from this bed for me. Thanks Allen!

And we removed the old rotten railroad ties that were fencing in the old flowerbed

The area looks a little bit better now. But this is just the beginning. We are hoping to remove that chain link fence in the spring and replace it with privacy fence. Then the entire area you see in this picture will be made into a huge back patio. I'm really excited about this project, I can't wait to be able to enjoy hanging out in the back yard. We think building a large patio off of the screened porch will allow us to have more use of this area. Right now, it is unusable space. It's just so ugly back there.

We have a giant yard, our entire property covers almost a half acre. That's actually quite a big yard, but all we do is mow it. Well, we run around back there with the dogs but it's such a waste of a huge yard for only 2 little dogs.
Read my earlier post HERE with more pics of the entire back yard.

Here are a few inspiration pics so you can see the direction we are heading with our back patio project

 I would sure love to have a pond or a fountain (or something similar) incorporated into our patio design.

I'll continue to post updates about our patio progress, but the actual construction won't happen until springtime, or maybe even next summer because we have to paint the house too!