Early Spring Yard Work

It's been unseasonably warm around here.  We decided to take advantage of it and get a jump start on some of our yard work.  Since we've gotten the front pretty much done, minus two small spots of planting grass and getting new gravel for the driveway, this year will be spent focusing on the back.

Today I was able to clean out the areas around the side of the house as well as some of the back yard area.  It was a lot of clearing out/cleaning up.  We also raked up the remaining small rocks from the path to where the old hot tub was and put it under the cement slab the garbage can sits on at the side of the house.  I also transplanted a ton of ground cover to this area.  I don't have any before pictures of this part though.  Oops!

Then we spent a lot of time clearing out roots in the back yard.  We have half of the yard grassed already from previous years' work.  Now it's time to work on the other side where the old hot tub deck was.  We've really let it go and you can tell.

Although the pictures may say otherwise, I was helping! haha  I just also try to remember to document these things via pictures so we can remember how things progress over time.  I couldn't have done it without Peter, though.  He's really the muscles behind everything.  

Next week we are hoping to finish clearing out and getting some grass planted around the side of the deck and halfway to the tree in the back.  We want to move the wall back on that side about a foot and aren't sure what we are going to do around the tree, but we don't want it to hold up planting grass where we know we want it.  I can visualize grass here and it makes me happy.  :)  The other side of the yard used to be stones and a big old fenced dog pen.  So if we can fix that up and the front, we should be able to do the rest of the back.  Really, I'm not worried about that as much as I am concerned about the darn hillside.  We are hoping to get that under control this year too, but it grows so quickly once the weather gets nice.  I just have to remember to focus on small steps.  There's always something to do when you own a house, but we've come such a long way from when we first moved in!