Never in my whole life...

...have I worked in the yard as much as I did this past weekend.

I've never been a yard work kind of girl, and Josh has never been a yard work kind of guy. Not really our thing.

But now we have this house. That sits on almost half an acre. Which, until Saturday, had overgrown, ugly, 25-year-old landscaping. And a tall dead tree in the back yard. My biggest pet peeve, however, was a super big, square bush on one side of our driveway. To park near it meant that you couldn't open the car door. Ugh.

Not being yard work people, we knew we needed help to tackle the beast. Enter my parents. My dad worked in landscaping when he was younger, and has a particular "know how" for just our kind of endeavor. You should see him with a rake! Or a shovel! And my mom is always up for a project. They graciously agreed to help us over the weekend.

So...
We dug.
We snapped roots.
We tugged at bushes.
We tugged from different angles.
We cut down scraggly branches.
We made a big heap of yard crap out front.

The dogs (the black one, Chloe, belongs to my parents) sat in the dirt and offered moral support.

And then our super helpful neighbor stopped by with a chainsaw and did all kinds of projects for us - including chopping down our dead backyard tree.

Naturally, we collected the largest pile of yard waste the neighborhood has ever seen.

It took two trips in the rented Lowe's truck to haul it all away.

And the truck was loaded up big time with each trip. And tied down with clothesline.

The fun part came on Sunday afternoon - plant shopping! I've never found nurseries to be remotely interesting until now. The options! The colors! The flowers! The bushes!

Before:

After:

(Squint and imagine we've seeded the dirt and grass has grown in):

We're hopeful that our bushes and flowers will grow up with a little TLC. Especially considering that the former landscaping was wildly overgrown, everything looks a bit dinky. But that will change with time - AND some extra flowers added in here and there.


Remember this tree?

It's gone!

We're planning to put a new cute tree there.

And that big a** bush conglomerate I hated?

Gone, too!

(Imagine it with grass. It helps.)

Our yard smells all kinds of wonderful - due to the pine bark mulch.

AND now we even have some azaleas in bloom!

Thank you Mom and Dad! We appreciated your help!

And maybe you've helped me discover a green thumb after all. Time will tell. I just hope we don't kill everything in the first couple of months.