Back Yard Progress

This past weekend was a VERY busy weekend for us. We have really been wanting to finish working on our patio. We have removed a ton of weeds, but there are still a lot. There are some very stubborn weeds growing between the pavers that are really hard to get up. They're kind of like Dandelions, but with no flowers. You have to get the roots, or they'll come right back. We don't want to spray any weed killer in that area because Bailey walks on it all the time and she likes to chew on the weeds. I hate the weeds, but it's definitely not worth making her sick. 

Anyway...to get the patio in order, we needed to:

- Dig up all the Hostas to thin them out (CHECK)

- Get rid of some of the Hostas (CHECK)

- Dig up the random trees/shrubs, get rid of the unwanted ones (CHECK)

- Till up the area surrounding the patio (CHECK)

- Put all plants back in place (CHECK)

- Level the dirt

- Put a border in place (Purchased...not installed)

- Mulch (Purchased...waiting to level dirt and put border up)

- Install water hose mount (Purchased supplies...just haven't done it yet)

We completed the bulk of what we wanted to do. It already looks a lot better, but it still looks like a big mess. I would LOVE to re-do the patio completely, but it just wouldn't make sense. We plan on building out deck next Spring/Summer. When we do that, we'll pour a concrete footing where the patio is now. It would be expensive and completely pointless. So...while I don't love the pavers we have now, they're better than nothing and they're certainly fine for just one summer. 

Digging the plants up, tilling the dirt, and getting the plants back down didn't take quite as long  as we thought it would. We threw out a ton of weeds and such. We filled up an entire 5 gallon bucket with rocks (on top of the ones we found when we were planting our garden). We had to pull up a lot of the black landscaping cloth. I did not enjoy doing this at all. All the plants were grown into it, along with weeds, grass and moss. 

We compared all the borders at Lowe's and we finally decided to use bricks. We decided against that plain black border. We saw some fake brick border that looked OK but it was expensive. That made us think of using real bricks. They look better and they're less than half the price. Well...they're not easy. That's why they're still sitting on our patio. I tried putting some of them down while Josh was cooking dinner on the grill but I was having such a hard time. If I got them straight, they weren't level and if I got them level, they weren't straight. I think we got about 6 in the ground before we quit for dinner. We decided to rest a little so we didn't go back to work on it after dinner. 

I really want to post pictures of our progress so far, but I think I'll wait to reveal until it's a little closer to finished. I'll share a few random pictures from the day to hold you over though :-)

This is what Bailey did for the majority of the day. She wasn't allowed out with us because A) We didn't want her to get hurt and B) She definitely would have gotten in the way. 

These are just some of the Hostas we dug up. We dug up 7 total, and we split a few of them. They are HEAVY. I gave away a few others and just had the people dig up the ones I didn't want (thank you Craigslist)!

This is Josh tilling up the dirt. It didn't take him nearly as long as I thought it would and I think he kind of enjoyed it :-)

We were both completely exhausted after spending literally all day working outside Saturday. We decided to take Sunday off. We got up and went to a new church. This one is our favorite one yet :-) They were having a "BBQ" cookout for young married couples later in the afternoon. We were interested in going because we don't have any married, or even engaged, friends that live near us. We had a few things we needed to pick up from Target and we had about 45 minutes before it started, so we decided to do that then go back to the cookout. We stayed in Target way too long. We picked up a lot of things we needed for the house, including this! I absolutely love my Dyson, but it isn't exactly great for spot cleaning on the stairs. It's great for vacuuming the floors, and it does a great job cleaning the stairs, but it is a pain to lug around on the stairs. I saw a little Dyson hand vac on display and I decided I had to have it. It was easy to maneuver, just like my Dyson ball. I couldn't find a price for it though. I figured it was just a hand vac, so it couldn't be too expensive. Come to find out, it's actually a stick vacuum that can also be a hand vac. At $300, I hardly consider it affordable for a hand vac. I wouldn't even use the stick vac function so it was definitely not a practical purchase for us. So...obviously, we decided on the $40 Shark. So far, I love it. It's great for a quick clean up of the stairs and vacuuming up random Bailey hairs. I think by the time it was all said and done, we were in Target almost an hour and a half, so we never made it back to church. We did leave with lots of new cleaning supplies for the house though. I got a new duster, some microfiber cloths, a container for Bailey's food, a new dry erase board (for meal planning) and other random things I think I'm crazy for getting so excited over. Since we went to Target to pick up literally 3 items, I'm banning myself from there for a few weeks.