Yard projects

No post yesterday, even though I took the day off from work. Why, you ask? Because Miz Becky and I labored mightily in the back yard, removing grass in pursuit of our Master Plan for the back yard. Which sounds very organized and mature, yes it does, except that our master plan mostly involved us vaguely gesturing around the yard: Perhaps a shrub bed there, and some kind of bed here in the middle, and a second patio over by the house, yes, that sounds nice.

Thursday evening, though, Miz Becky made the most concrete version of the plan to date: Actual outlines! In the actual yard!

Bearing in mind that the photo is heavily foreshortened, you can get a sense of what we're moving towards.

The first patio was a great addition to the yard, which was largely a blank square when we moved in. Now we're ready to make it even less square, and add some "rooms" to the space, surrounded by beautiful beds filled with largely native plants.

You can see the outline of a future patio in the foreground, and a shrub bed to the right; the two chairs are arranged in the "nook", which is defined on one side by the shrub bed, and on the other by another bed of some sort which you can barely see outlined in an orange extension cord.

There are also a couple more small beds, on either side of the "entrance" to the patio, in an effort to soften that edge.

After many hours of labor, and a comedy of errors that included the equipment rental place thinking we wanted the sod cutter today instead of yesterday, and U-Haul thinking we wanted to rent a moving truck, instead of a pickup truck, we managed to remove sod from the two big areas we wanted to, and haul most of it away.

It doesn't look that impressive in the picture, but my aching arms disagree. There's still a bit of sod cutting to do -- refining the edges and so forth -- but we got most of it done. Then of course comes the really hard work, which Miz Becky mysteriously thinks of as fun: choosing and planting the shrubs that will fill the space.

I'm not really a yard work person; growing up on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building firmly fixed in my head the idea that yard work is something that other people do, usually at a great distance. I'm much more suited to doing cheesy visualizations in Photoshop: