Our backyard project: the before

30 March 2017

We love many things about our home, but the backyard has never been one of them. It’s small, sloped, exposed, littered with acorns and sweet gum balls, and not receptive to our efforts at grass growing. For the last four years we’ve hardly spent any time out there, preferring to hang on our front porch (we mostly just went around back to tend the vegetable garden and grill).

We can’t change the size of our yard, but we’ve always hoped to do a major renovation to make it work a lot harder for us. With June’s arrival, it seemed like the time was right, so I spent part of my maternity leave getting quotes and meeting with landscape folks. It was shockingly hard to get people to respond to our calls and emails! (I was like, do you KNOW how much money I’m trying to give you??)

Speaking of so much money… a few quotes did come back, and they were higher than we were anticipating. We had saved up a good amount, but just didn’t feel comfortable moving forward. So, we tabled the project last spring.

Then, early this year, we received an unexpected and generous gift from a family member. It wasn’t large enough to, say, make a huge difference in our mortgage (and we already feel good about our progress and plan there), but it was enough to make our backyard project a reality. We were SO excited to start the ball rolling again, and the best part is that though the gift was given with no strings attached, I think the giver would be very excited about where it’s going, because kids being outside is something near and dear to her heart.

As it is to ours. I’ll share more about our plans in my next post, but for now, I wanted to show y’all the before photos!