The Yard: 12 Years In The Making

Now that we're smack dab in the middle of gardening season nirvana, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at where the yard started.

I bought this house in October of 2001.  The yard was a nightmare, to say the least, but I needed to make the house livable first.  So I spent the winter working my butt off on the inside.

Here's a little peek at my new dream home:

This is the living room.
The fake wood paneling was especially nice.
That, and the grossest wall to wall carpeting you've ever seen in your life.

A beautiful pepto bathroom.

Floor to ceiling sunshine yellow kitchen, which also included a wall of fake paneling.

The lovely surprise of wallpaper was under it.

My realtor said that I must have a vision.  

Well, that, and the fact that a major fixer-upper was the only thing I could afford.

Once spring hit, I was out in the dirt.

I wish I had taken more before photos.

These are actually after I had done most of the cleanup. 

I filled a dumpster with junk.

So this is the patio I inherited.
Don't be jealous.

It's actually where the existing patio still is.
You can sort of see the amazing green corrugated roof goodness peeking out.

This is the back of the house, mint green metal siding and all.

I got lucky and had a new roof put on in the sale.

That was about the only thing it had goin' for it at this point.

This is the north side of the backyard.

There was a rickety old picket fence on all three sides.

The back corner on that side.

This is the east side, the back of the lot.
It's funny to see how small that rhody was.

The other back corner.

After I got all the junk hauled away, I ripped out the picket fence.

I used the boards to build window boxes for all the windows.

I also started tearing out lawn.

There was only, what used to be before the weeds and grass took over, a small planting bed around the perimeter.

It was about a foot and a half deep or so.

As you can see, that clearly wasn't sufficient for the likes of me.

That is a serious pile of sod right there.

Awww, to have the energy of a 20-something-year-old again.

More grass was removed around the whole perimeter, and the plants started goin' in.
The majority of what I started with were plants that I had brought with me and starts of things from my mom's yard.

I made a small bed along the back of the house, on the right in this next photo.

I was also having a fence built during this time.

Posts are set.

Fence is up and my first summer is in full force.
The hydrangea was one of the only existing plants here.
You can see two of the window boxes that I built with the old fence pickets.
I actually still have one by the back door that miraculously hasn't fallen apart yet.

I put a veggie and herb garden on the south side that first year.

This is the north side, same as the picture with the white van above.

Once The Dad was in the picture - we met the summer of 2002 - he built the fence :o) - 2003's major project was ripping all that God-awful metal siding off.

This is the front of the house, in progress.

Aside from the ghetto-looking house, look at all that lawn!
And the ugly magnolia tree that I had mentioned the other day.

The south side.

I spent that summer sanding the entire house.

I also used a heat gun to remove all the paint from the window trim.

That was a looooong project and it was not even a little bit fun.

Scraping windows in 90 degree weather with a heat gun is high on my "never again" list.

But we got it all finished and finally got it painted.

The Dad (not actually a dad, or even a husband, at this point) extended the fence forward to the front corner of the house, on the south side, for more privacy.

We also ripped out the old pergola over the patio and built a new one.

We used pavers to widen the existing concrete patio across more of the back of the house, as well.

And one of my favorite parts of the backyard, which is no longer there, was the boardwalk pathway he built me.

I loved that thing.

We had to rip it up when we added on to the back of the house in 2006.  :(

I know the dates on the photos say '94 (gotta love the old school cameras, right?), but these are from the summer of 2004.
The year we got married.

This photo is the same view as the mint siding photo above.

A few more from the same year.
I rearrange outside as often as I do inside.  :)

Look at that beautiful wood path.

Someday I'll have a boardwalk again.

These next ones are from our wedding reception that we had in the backyard.
I had to throw these in to show how much more lawn we used to have.
Awwww.

You can see how much bigger that rhody in the back corner had grown, even by then.

Looking toward the other back corner.

Crazy.

It doesn't seem like it's been that long.

Anywho, fast forward a couple years, and once we found out I was pregnant with Baby #2, we decided to add on to the back of the house.

So bye-bye boardwalk - and everything else.
This was the spring of 2007.

We put an addition along the whole back of the house, minus the patio area behind the garage where the pergola is.

It's about 30 feet wide and came out into the yard about 12 feet.

Look at how little The Kid is.
He was 18 months old when we first started.

The inside was finished (well, livable) by the time The Girl was born in October, but we didn't put the siding on until the following summer.
Cedar siding is EXPENSIVE!
We waited until we could find it used, and ended up finding it on Craigslist.
They had the rough side facing out on their house, so that's why it looks new.
The smooth side, that we wanted, had never been painted.

Because we lost half of our patio area, and basically half of my flower beds, we built a deck out the other direction, behind the patio, into the yard.
We also jacked up the pergola because of where our new french doors went in - it sat too low for head clearance comin' off the top step.

And then, in 2012, in true Mindy fashion, pregnant with Baby, I dug out more sod and put in the fire pit area off the back of the deck.

So should we do some side by side before and afters for fun?

The south side.
It's changed quite a bit since the yuccas in the first pictures.

The east side.

The north side.

The back of the house.

Another angle of the back.

Crazy, right?
Here are some pictures of the front from last spring.
Clearly, the lawn is long gone.

And more shots of the back in the summer.

East side - the back of the yard.

The south side, where the veggies were the first year, is now partly house, but this is the same view.

The flower beds along the back of the house and the wine bottle path.

And the fire pit area.

A lot of work has gone into this house.
A lot of man hours put in by The Dad and yours truly.
Inside and out.
When I bought this house, never in a zillion years would I have thought, as a 25-year-old, that I would still be here with a husband and three kids.
But it has become more than I could have imagined a house to be when when I was in my 20's.
We're crammed in like sardines, I complain about the things that aren't done yet, or the things I wish we could change, and it ain't on the greatest street in town, but it's ours and it's home.
And here we go, into another gardening season.
Which is almost guaranteed to bring more changes.

Shameless plug alert:  

Just a little reminder that you can purchase my floral photographs in my Etsy shop.

If you see one in a post that isn't in the shop, shoot me an email and I'll list it for ya.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/RindyMae