Thursday, July 31, 2008

Hard Work

When we bought our house last summer, the house was in good shape, but the yard was another story. The woman who lived in there before it was rennovated was blind, and not that I personally have anything against blind people, but I don't think anyone ever did a thing to take care of that yard. The whole place was covered in a vine-y weed that would go underground, then come back up, go underground, then come back up, and so on. Which means, this is not your typical weed. You can't just go out and pull the thing out of the dirt.

Last year, Nick pulled out the old chain link disaster of a fence, which was covered by none other than that vine-y weed, and entagled in old little crappy dead trees. Once all of that was removed, he put in a new privacy fence. Since then, we've been doing things like trying to tame the devil weeds and grow grass, make flower beds, replace ugly bushes with new pretty ones, and so on. The larger projects this summer are rocking the side of the house (where no grass will grow since that's the dogs' running path), move the AC to the side, put in a patio, run electric to the garage, finish the privacy fence along the back, and tear out an old section of fence and a tree stump to put in a parking pad. We're finally moving along and making some nice progress.

One of the things that drove me crazy was this tree we have in the back yard. It was completly covered by the vine-y weed. It killed me someone was letting that weed bascially strangle the tree. I tried tackling that thing last year, but didn't make much progress. One of the first things I did when the weather turned nice this season was remove that vine from the tree and make a nice flower bed around it.

Here is a before picture of what the tree looked like:


Here is the after picture: