Writing this is bittersweet. For the simple reason that our yard looks nothing like this right now. It’s frost covered and only small patches of green are left. The flowers are long gone and the kids aren’t quite as eager to head out and play. Unlike summer time when it takes some serious convincing to get them to come inside.

I had to do some digging to round up my before pictures. The first ones you’ll see are from a couple summers ago. At this point we had planted grass and put in several flower beds. The playhouse was up but we didn’t have any plans of what we would do around it. We just knew that keeping grass around it was going to be a difficult task with all the little feet that continually stomped around. Also, as you can see, we had quite bit of crazy brush.

We wanted a bigger grassy area for the kids and the dog to run around in, and wanted to cut back on what always became really overgrown. We cut down SO MANY TREES. For a couple reasons. To make more space. To replace them with evergreens (less leaves and more green in the yard during the winter). The biggest reason being that we get some pretty gnarly windstorms and we’ve cleared out all potential trees that could fall on our house. We also had to locate some pipes in our backyard last spring and had a few large holes to fill and level out.

We cut down trees. Pulled stumps and brush. Dug up more roots than I ever care to deal with again. Raked piles and piles of top soil. Dug up more roots. Planted grass and spent many days and nights watering and yelling at kids and dogs to stay off it. Transplanted trees. Built a sandbox around the entire playhouse and brought in sand. I spent many glorious days planting flowers and making new beds. All so that our yard can look like this:

Sharky now has more room to roam and play with his friends. The kids ride their bikes from front to back and all over. All the neighborhood kids come and spend afternoons building sandcastles and jumping from tire to tire. We spent the summer hosting BBQ’s and enjoying every bit of the hard work we put in. Just writing this excites me and I’m ready to count down the days until that grass greens up again and we can spend all our days outside. When we have a lot more of this.