Landscape Saturday 4 & 5 –– Still "Undo-ing" the Backyard

It's been a while since I posted, and not much has changed, as in we are still at it clearing out the backyard. While I knew we bought a house that needed to be gutted, I sorely underestimated the amount of work it also takes to gut a yard. You just don't even think of that, but when a yard is overgrown to the point of looking like a forest, it does take more than you'd expect to get it all out.

As you saw from my previous post we have had a couple of bobcats and tractors come through and clear parts of backyard already. We originally left the "shrubbery" beside the garage because the garage is quite large, and the paint was peeling very badly behind the shrubbery.

Shrubbery left beside the garage 

A couple of weeks ago we tried to take matters into our own hands and trim this ourselves ...

... It went from looking like this to ...

... like this, but it unfortunately accented everything bad, instead of looking good ...

As we want to renovate the garage completely in another couple of years, we originally didn't want to pay to repaint something we'd just be "undoing" soon after. But we soon changed our tune on this because it just looked so terrible, especially against the rest of the yard so nice and completely cleared out from the previous tractor.

So in came the painter, and back came Jack (the tractor guy we found on Craigslist, who we now have quite an affinity for!)

Jack's arrival

Our painter even was up for the side job of hauling off all these bricks and cinder blocks
(believe it or not, all this stuff was in the backyard too)

He just backed up his friend's pickup and loaded it off to the dump

Jack finishing up on the newly (and fully!) cleared out backyard,
with the newly painted garage 

So great!

Except he left this pile almost as tall as our house!

Which took 2 weekends to saw and cut up.
The process was really tiring but we are GLAD.THIS.IS.DONE.

We're thinking we can make it go away in 3 trips to the curb – they'll pick this sort of stuff from your curbside in Charlotte if you don't "overdo" it, so we tried to cut and stack it very neatly in hopes that it seemed like less than it was :)

Pickup is Wednesday, so we'll see!

More later this week...