AV and I moved into a house that was definitely fit to live in on the inside. A fresh coat of paint, new locks, and our own clearing away of the previous owner’s aesthetic choices were really all we needed to get in the house and feel at home. There are still several outstanding projects inside – we have to hang our art, the baseboard mouldings are sorely in need of fixing – but it’s all very livable. I’m grateful for this, because I couldn’t live or work in a house that was in a half-livable state of affairs.
One project that has required our attention, though, is the backyard. There was a sandstone path leading from the house to the garage, a concrete sidewalk that went to nowhere, and weeds. Weeds are everywhere, and there was once grass too, but when we left for our three-week tour of the Americas the backyard died under the stress of too many hot days. When we returned, AV started working back there in piecemeal fashion, taking up the sandstone path and bringing a power chisel to the existential sidewalk.
Just before our housewarming party in July, we built a couple of planters using some of the concrete and a sandstone slab to give an additional step into the lawn. Yesterday, we worked for a paltry two-and-a-half hours and achieved the following:
So we’ve constructed a porch using the sandstone slabs and some random bricks that were in the back yard, and we’ve made for ourselves a little fire pit using concrete. The best part of all of this is that the money we’ve spent to make this subtle change was related to plants and soil for those plants. We were enterprising enough to use everything else from the backyard as-is.
What was exciting for both of us was the change that resulted from just a couple of hours of effort. Once we finished the porch, I got to planting some pachysandra on the north side of the garage that had been waiting to be planted for over a month. A giant pile of dirt was smoothed out, and voila! Another bed for plants needing partial exposure!
AV and Lilly barely make it into the photo here!
There’s still a lot of work to be done – there are some troublesome shrubs on the back of the garage with huge stones that need addressing. We seem to have a drainage problem off the south side of the house (probably requires a perforated PVC pipe to get that water back into the ground), and we still have designs on beds for next summer’s vegetable garden and a compost bin. But those will come in time. Today AV and I get to enjoy our porch and enjoy it for the many days of sunshine and pleasant evenings left between now and December.
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