Backyard - Before

A blank slate. should be fun to see come together.

The south side yard - this will all be left unlandscaped for now, for a future pool (maybe!)

The north side yard.

The workers starting to work this morning. View from the southwest side.

After the rush of the holidays, we finally got to sit down and re-hash the backyard plans. Around the end of last year, we got bids from the low teens to just under $20K (yeah right, who are they kidding? that's without landscaping on the south side even). Kevin and I decided that we wouldn't spend a bunch of money on the backyard even if our lowest bid was priced nicely (or so I thought). So we waited on going forward with the plans. Kevin thought we could get it done cheaper than the low bid, and with the slow economy, we were just a little "if-y" on going forward. But we also knew it had to get done soon. So we set a much lower budget and I told the landscape company we had decided to go with that we were unwilling to spend that much money on a backyard and would reconsider their bid if they could come down on their price. And lo and behold, they did. Amazingly we are still getting pretty much what we want AND saving a few thousand in the process. We are all excited for our big dirt yard to disappear (well, minus the part that we left out for a future pool). I had to take "before" photos, for memories' sake. It may not be all done this week as we have rain EVERY DAY in the forecast. How lucky are we?!