Landscaping

     There are a few things around the house that we want done, and one of them is landscaping the backyard.  When I was house shopping last year, this house was one of the ones that kept popping up in my search, but I kept passing over it because of the backyard.  It looked small and too sloped and not very kid-friendly.  I'm glad I decided to come see the house for myself, though, because it's a great house for us.

     But the backyard still needs work.  Right now we have some large trees along the fence that will have to stay here for a while, but we also have some plants in the middle of the yard that cut the yard in half and make it look a lot smaller than it is.  Here's what our backyard looked like a couple of days ago before I tackled it:

I can't remember if I showed a picture of the deck here on my blog or not, but we had the deck torn down last year because it was in awful shape.

This was the state of the railing when we looked at the house (the boards hadn't been pulled up yet, I did that).  We bought the house with the understanding that this railing was a safety hazard and that we would have to address it right away.

 This is what one of the previous owners had done.  The under layer of the deck had begun to go bad, but rather than replacing it, they just slapped some new boards on top of it . . .

 . . . which led to fungus growing in between the layers and to both layers of wood rotting.

Gross, I know.  This wasn't even the worst one.

This is as much as I was able to get done by myself.  I pulled up most of the top layer of boards and I knocked down the biggest part of the weak railing.

We contacted a deck guy a few months later who came by and took down the rest for us.

(This is how it's looked since then)

     Our backyard looks a lot bigger now that the deck is gone, but we keep this sliding door from opening in a few different ways until we get a new deck.  The new deck and the landscaping are what we're going to spend our house budget on for now.

So far I've cut down most of two trees and taken out some of the flowers.  You saw the Before pictures, and here are some After pictures.

I've never seen a bush grow so crooked before!  The branches were growing at 90-degree angles and twisting and turning; leaves were sprouting out of what looked like almost-dead branches; it was crazy.  Mc says it looks like it was cursed.  ;)

And I've started on the overgrown flower bushes.  Some of those had deep and sprawling roots, especially up near the cursed bush; those were tough to get out.

These flower bushes were really pretty when they were in full bloom a couple of months ago,

but we have limited space in our yard and I want to use the space for gardening.

     My plans for this backyard---and what I've always wanted for a yard of our own---are to plant two or three fruit trees near the fence and then plant a vegetable garden elsewhere.  But planting on these slopes isn't practical and the plants would get unearthed from us walking up the hill and from the rain.  These sloping parts of our yard are awful; they're a waste of space and of good soil because the soil falls away from the plants, most notably from these tree roots:

And look at how much yard is wasted because of the slope of the yard!

     We're going to keep the flat tier we've already got in the middle of the yard and then work around it.  I want to have access to the whole yard via walkways and have that hill contained by retaining walls.  I've been looking online at pictures of tiered backyards for ideas, and we haven't yet decided if we're going to hire someone to do it for us or if we're going to do most of it ourselves.  Depends on the design we choose.  At the very least we'll do the prep work ourselves by removing what we don't want.  I'm looking forward to a backyard that's much more functional and more spacious for the kids to run around, and that will look more appealing to future potential buyers when we do end up selling this house.