She’s Baaaack!!!
I’ve mentioned her name at least a half dozen times, she’s posted here before and she leaves smart ass comments all over the place on this blog. There’s only one person I could be talking about, and that’s Cheri, my officemate! She’s here to show you the Before and After photos of her backyard. Turns out it was filled with treasures, like rocks, pipes, broken glass and a baby boy named Riley! Enjoy!
When Derek and I bought our house, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Let me remind you that this is what we saw when we first laid eyes on the place:
When you’re trying to renovate a house as nice as that, things like the backyard fall by the wayside. When we took a break from prying off wood paneling, wondering why the hell the dryer was in the kitchen, or steaming wallpaper off the living room ceiling, we would peer out into the backyard and dream of a day when it didn’t look like an overgrown jungle. Here’s our backyard before:
Nice, huh? Here is Derek’s feeble attempt at cutting through the grass the first time.
But now that we’ve been in the house almost two years, we’ve been able to make some dramatic improvements to the backyard. It’s still a work in progress though. Hopefully by the end of the summer we’ll have a fenced-in yard. Oh, and more grass than weeds.
Here’s what we’ve done so far. We hacked into the jungle in the first picture. The discoveries we made! A concrete slab! Tons of garbage and broken glass. (Here’s a tip: If you put your garbage on the curb, once a week a noisy truck will come pick it up. Why dump it in your yard?) We are now building our own super classy rock wall complete with bricks older than me, and some funky pipes.
Do you think this is the top of the well Baby Jessica fell into?
We also cut down a HUGE apple tree that did nothing for us except kill the grass underneath it and drop hundreds of wormy, nasty apples that I had to pick up all summer and risk the swarms of bees the apples attracted. I guess I don’t have a very good before picture of the tree, but here’s the after picture. It was big. Count the rings, you’ll see.
The other addition to our backyard is a gazebo. Long story short, it was my parent’s and they couldn’t have it at their new house, so I bought it from my dad for $1. (P.S. Hey Dad, I would’ve paid much more for it. Maybe even $5!)
Clearly, little baby Riley is very impressed with his new gazebo.
So as you can see our backyard is improved, but it still has a way to go. We need to build a deck so when we step out of the patio doors we installed, there isn’t a three-foot drop to the ground. Someday…
A Note from Liz: By the way, you know that cute baby you see in the above photo? That’s who was in here!
