Outdoor Spring Cleaning

Or…It has to get worse before it can get better.

We’ve been playing outside as much as we can lately. It’s SO nice to be outdoors.
(Don’t let that death grip looking photo fool you. lol. We like the dirt. I was just trying to keep her still long enough to send Daddy a text of outdoor fun evidence.)

 



But our outdoors is kinda majorly in need of love.
(Like everything about our house.)

Yesterday I showed you our indoor spring cleaning….today I’ll show you the outdoors.

Our house the day we bought it.

Those bushes are covering so much of the house. I knew right away I’d want to take them out. Besides the bottom half of them was all bare with no greenery.

So I thought the house was looking rough,when we bought it….

but then I looked our house up on google map street view 

(they took the last photo before I’d ever seen the house)…

 it used to be OUT OF CONTROL!

I mean, where is our house?

And where is the grass? 

Oh, there is none. (Still none -- just dandelions.)

This photo solved a mystery for me, I guess they just chopped those huge bushes on the left off at some point. (Likely when they listed the house.) We have the steams of those bushes in our front yard still. I didn’t really know why anyone would chop a bush up like that and just leave the messy sticks there.  But once I saw that photo I saw that the sticks are actually an improvement. (Not that I condone doing half jobs. Still should have gotten rid of the bases.)

I also makes more sense to me about our Pine Tree. You really can’t see it in these photos unless you know where to look. (In the top photo, on the left in the middle of a bunch of green leaves, you can just barely see it’s more blue needles.) Anyway, the base of the tree is all limbed up, I just now realized it was because those bushes were overtaking it. (In person, that is CRAZY they aren’t very close together.)

I think back at some point this yard was very nicely thought out and very pretty. But given way too much time of neglect, and our own personal hopes for the space, tons of our landscaping needs to go.

Blake’s been hard at work chopping down more stuff. 

There he is out the window, working away.

Here’s a halfway photo of our bush removal.

And now they are gone. Check out all those leaf bags! (That’s our second round! The city already took about that many from us the first time around.)

I got used to the bushes, so it looks a little naked to me. But we will be landscaping it. (Eventually.) I think it’s an improvement. But our yard is COVERED in brush and landscaping edging that we need to take to the landscaping recycling place.

If you ever miss the good old days of door to door salesmen, just leave your yard full of leaves, and/or chopped up landscaping, right in the middle of a well kept neighborhood. You will get a flyer at least twice a week, and visitors just about as often, offering their services to help you with your yard. Clearly our yard cries for help. We’ve had these flyers and visitors since the snow melted (before we littered our yard with branches.) But we are doing it ourselves, we really don’t want to pay for it to be done by all these people offereing. But Blake has a full time job, and I have a preschooler and a toddler…we are doing it on our time schedule. Sorry neighborhood. We’re getting there. I promise, someday you’ll like the view.

Same story in the back yard. Landscaping gone wild.

These bushes, I’m not sure I’ll ever get why they were placed here. They are at the end of our deck and separate a space that doesn’t seem to need separating.

We took them down. 

Another view -- bush remains on the right of the deck.

There’s Blake, back there chopping away more shrubs that surround a tree.
We want more yard, less shrubs.


See, there is just really nothing to be gained by those bushes back there.


Both trees in  the corners seemed to be wearing skirts made of bushes. I’ve never really since the look before. (I mean even imagining it before it grew too big.) It’s crowded.

Those very tall ones on the left, I actually like those, I think it makes our yard more private. They need care, but I hope to keep them and make them work better. 

Anyway, so for now we play around these piles, until we can haul them off.

But you can definitely still hunt for Easter Eggs a mist the chaos!

We have our work cut out for us. But we’re excited.

We are settling in here, we have time to do it.

I’ve been thinking of it as urban homesteading.