Summer of 2010 - June thru August

Josh and I love to work on projects together...even though neither one of us have really ever done it before we figure it out together and it makes for a great date! Usually it starts with an idea like "Hey wouldn't it be great if mowing the lawn didn't take 2 hours! Why don't we rip out the grass and put in a BBQ area?"

I will add more pictures of our yard as things defrost and the plants start to grow again! Until then here are the before and after pictures.

This is what the backyard looked like when we bought it. We decided to wait one year to see what everything was before we changed anything. There is garden (bottom right), grape vines, an apple tree, a peach tree, and TONS of grass.

This is the other side of the backyard. We couldn't really get the grass to grow under the deck so ...that was the first thing to go!


Josh's parents live in Idaho and introduced us to using rock harvested out of the local canyon to build floors. We found someone willing to allow us to take the rock we needed without charging us for it! Hooray! Then it was a matter of getting broken bags of cement from Home Depot for less than $1.00 a bag and doing a little bit of work at a time (the YW even got to help with some of the work for an activity night!). We have two flower beds and a place to hang our hammocks from Mexico. I'll see if I can get a good picture of it and then post it a bit later.



Once we got the patio finished we moved on to the other side of the yard by the fence.



We ripped out a ton of grass, the apple tree which basically tipped over on its own, and the garden area that had been there before. We put the trampoline where the garden was, made another rock patio for a BBQ area, and are planning to add a smaller square foot/lasagna garden over by the peach tree. Then we filled in the other areas with bark and stepping stones!

Here is the semi finished rock patio/BBQ area! Hopefully this year we will get to add the BBQ/counter part. I really want to create something out of some kind of sheet metal but we'll have to see about that. We planted hybrid willow trees as a screen all along our fence line since we can see into....even though we don't look...all the neighbor's yards and the willows grow super fast (that they were free helped too). In fact a few of them at 1 year are already poking up above the white fence you see in the picture. We then added a pergola with four flower boxes and two benches for more outdoor seating when we have parties!

It is still a work in progress. Each week I save my change from groceries so that I can buy a couple of pieces of cinder block for the back wall. My plan is to build it up so it is the same height and then stucco the wall and paint a Tuscany mural on it...or something like that. The top of the wall has creeping time growing in it so that will add to the Tuscany feeling. We also will be adding more flowers this year and helping the grass be more healthy. I did a test to see how much nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus were in the ground for my lawn to feed on and everything was great except Nitrogen! It was at 0! Yikes! I think that explains why it has so many issues!

Before we even began this project we redid our front yard and made it look more like the place we had in Sandy! I loved that yard! But I'm going to wait on those pictures so the Rose of Sharon hedge has a chance to grow in more.