The Backyard

I feel like it’s been so long since I’ve talked about what’s been going on at the house here on the blog. In some ways it feels like we’ve done so much, but then I start thinking of how much we still have to do and shy away from talking about it. The backyard is definitely one of those spots, but it’s gone through such a big transformation already that I thought it’d be fun to share a little update. 

I took these photos on one of our first walkthroughs of the house…

Everything was so overgrown, and you could barely even see the stream from the patio (which is my favorite part of the backyard!). The area on the other side of the shed you couldn’t even walk through. In the fall Frank went through and just started chopping stuff down so the pups at least had some spots to walk around. He also ended up taking out the fence. We originally thought we’d keep it, but once he really looked at it he realized that most of it was already rotted through. Bummer.

Here’s where we’re at now! We just recently found and uncovered a little path halfway down the hill. Things still need to be cleaned up a bit, and I can’t wait until the ivy is all gone and we can really plant and landscape things. I’m also excited for all the trees to fully bloom so everything goes back to being super private again (although, it’s only a dirt road behind us, so it’s pretty quiet anyway). Before it was almost impossible to walk through the yard, so it’s really nice to have things clear and not worry about being attacked by thorns or various other plants now. 

I really wish I had a good before photo from this angle because you couldn’t even see down the stream, much less walk along it. We love that tree that fell across the stream, it’s still living so we plan on keeping it and using it as a little “bridge”. We also spent some time cleaning the stream itself up a bit and Frank actually spotted some deer hanging down near the end the other night:)

Those of you have been following my blog for a while might be wondering whatever happened to the chickens. Well, Chuck and Olive are still around! They have their own little spot in the yard, although we’d like to eventually move them to one of the newly cleared spots and extend their run so they have some extra space to spread their wings.

Frank has also been working on building us a composting spot out of branches from our clearning things out. Seriously, how cool does it already look? I can’t wait to see how it looks when he’s all done! 

Even though we still have a long way to go it feels amazing to be able to really enjoy the backyard and to also be able to start planning what we want to do with it from here.