The Suburban Backyard Facelift: Where it all Started

Let's start at the very beginning. When we were house hunting, our must haves were 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, an attached garage, and a yard. We're outdoorsy people, we're (future) dog people, we're barbecue people, and we're planning to be baby people some day. Did you catch my drift... we're lawn people.

Our house had it all, except the perfect lawn. But with a big lot (for the Seattle area in our price range) at 10,000 square feet, we saw potential. Even before we'd put in an offer we talked about what we could do, where a dog house could go, where we'd get the best sun for a garden.

During our inspection, we learned about some major moss growth on the roof. I guess its pretty common around here due to all the moisture. But it can significantly reduce the life of your roof. We also had a serious water in the crawl-space issue going on. Bottom line: we had a lot of water going on.

So once the deal was done, we wasted no time getting to work. We closed on our house in January, we knew if we wanted grass by summer we had a tight timeline. We talked about holding off a year, but with trips, adventures, and life coming at us fast, we figured there's no time like the present.

Here is what we started with... about 12 feet of grass/moss/clover behind our house- then dense vegetation all the way to our property line.

Looking Straight Out From the Patio

Looking Left from the Patio

One Saturday morning we made a trip down to our neighborhood Home Depot and ended up picking out some work gloves and yard tools (Being our first house we had nothing in the way of tools). I started working on the salal while Greg went to town limbing up trees. We used the basics: a bow rake, loppers, and a pruning saw.

It didn't take long to discover there was more than salal back there- much to our surprise we had our very own blackberry farm mixed into the thick of things. In true suburbanista fashion, I discovered the thorns, but it was actually our handy neighbor Steve who enlightened me on the joys of blackberry.

Sidenote: Our neighbor Steve is totally channeling Wilson from Tool Time- remember him?

So with many pricks, I proceeded to cut, pull, stack, stuff  the assortment of things tangled together into our yard waste bin. It took a good few weeks of filling the bin and even getting a second bin (only $10 extra per month-so worth it) to make some progress on this mess. Once we had things above the surface under control, we put that rake to use going after the root systems.

Limbed up and cleared out 

While I was going to town on the "forest floor," Greg continued working away on our trees. We limbed everything up, and then Greg had some man-time taking down the sub 6" puppies closet to the house. You can see we left the stumps about 2 feet above ground... more on that down the road. Fire wood was saved, yard waste was packed, and our arms were exhausted.

To be continued...