Summer Time

Many of you may not know about one of the nicer parts of our house since I have yet to post anything about it. This is the backyard. In its current state it's not a lot to look at, but there is a lot of room. While we will continue to do miscellaneous work around the inside of the house, the next three months are going to be dedicated to the yard. We are hoping to turn it from an eyesore to a useful and relaxing space.

The major item that we have to deal with is the pool. You can't see because of the cover, but there are bushes and trees growing up from the bottom (the liner is gone and it's a soft bottomed pool). Needless to say, between the costs to maintain a pool and the cost to get ours up and running again, we aren't going to keep it. This requires ripping out the walls and filling it in with clean fill

Here is the pool. You'll also notice there is a lot of cracked cement around the pool. This means that we need to rip out a lot of cement. Nate decided that instead of renting equipment to do this, that we are going to do this by hand. Crazy you say? I thought so too. Regardless, Nate went out and started wacking at the cement with a sledge hammer. To our surprise, the cement is actually quite thin. Underneath is actually some really nice rock that we may reuse to make a patio. Since it actually is pretty easy to break apart, and we have the time to do it, Nate wins this one.

Here is the broken up cement. Even I can break it apart (although I have to use the little sledge hammer)

This is after a combination of Nate and I working for a total of about 3 hours. One whole slab is almost gone! This was taken from our 3 season porch. Our goal is to put doors in that lead out onto a deck.

From this view the deck would start right above the door to the basement and would wrap around the house. Another thing we have to deal with in the backyard is the falling down gazebo that is currently holding all of our large trash items from the inside renovations. We are going to rent a roll off and load all the trash and broken cement into that and then down the gazebo will go. Right now it is doing a good job blocking the side yard so we're hoping once we get the pool and gazebo out it's going to look like the huge yard it is.

Traveling around the gazebo you can see that the side yard is pretty overgrown. Hopefully some TLC will get it looking very nice

The most private part of the yard is a small section on the far side of the house. We're hoping to have this be a seating area of some sort.

So that's our backyard. Hopefully over the next few months a complete transformation will occur!