A Little Landscaping

I'll be honest, I don't know anything about landscaping. What?! Shock! Gasp! Okay, so maybe that's not such a big surprise. I have never cared much about flowers or crib appeal. I don't know what makes sense for a yard, or any of that kind of thing. Why would I care? Before we lived in this house, we lived in an apartment and we didn't have a yard to deal with. But now the game has changed. We have a yard. And we have to figure out how to make it pretty.

Easier said than done, by the way.

But that doesn't mean it can't be done. We just have to go with our gut (or I guess guts...??) and find the motivation to actually follow through with our plans. I think that is probably our number one problem - I don't have time to do it by myself during the day because of Addison, plus then I would have to do it by myself. Week nights aren't ideal because Addison doesn't go down until 7:30-8:00 and now it's getting dark sooner. Then the weekends come around and we are both so exhausted from the week that we don't want to do any work. Strike that, Rob doesn't want to do any manual labor - I don't blame him. He works two jobs and he doesn't really want to come home and work. But I tend to get motivated on the weekends, which poses a problem for us.

But somehow, we found the motivation this particular weekend to start working on our landscaping. Okay, so my motivation, I basically mean that I said we should do this and then we started doing it. Of course, about halfway through I was really regretting it. Relaxing on a Saturday sounded like such a better idea at that point, but there was no turning back.

So while Addie played on the blanket laid in the grass, Rob started pulling up border rocks and I started moving all the little ones.

Addie did her best to help before she did eventually had to go down for a nap. I got the rest of the rocks moved after lunch, while Rob worked on reworking the border. We worked on this a month or so ago and it was a beautiful day - the perfect temperature but after moving all the rocks, I was sweating like you wouldn't believe. Plus my back was killing me. Did I mention that we don't have a wheel barrel, so I moved all those rocks using a little blue bucket?! Exhausting!

Our project came to a stand still until Addison got up and we could make a trip to Home Depot to get some dirt. We needed to fill in and flatten. Just in case you were wondering, you will use a lot more dirt than you realize you will. Those bags of dirt don't go very far, so we had to take another trip back to get more dirt.

I was already liking the way it was looking. The last step was putting down grass seed. Again it was something else we had never done before, but after reading the bag - simple enough - we figured it out. It's not exactly the most complicated process.

And now all we could do was wait. The bag said that we would have to wait anywhere from 7 to 14 days for the grass to start peeking through. And sure enough it was about 7 days before we saw any grass. And I was pretty pumped when the grass did start coming in. I have a low entertainment level I guess.

It's been about a month since we did this and this is our grass now:

It looks really good. We're pretty excited about this. We need to rake but it looks good. In the scheme of things this was an easy first landscaping project for us. It got our hands dirty - literally - and checked something off our list of things we wanted to do. Of course the list is still pretty long, but at least one thing is checked off, so there's that.