Side Yard and Ivy

My pops is in town visiting, so after some golf and some dinners out, it's time to do some fun yard work. And boy did we have some fun back there. First we went to town on some stumps. We cut the tops off and then drilled a bunch of wholes in the tops of the stumps. Then we dumped some "stump out" into the wholes and added water. The idea is this should rot the stump from the inside so we can easily grind it up and just put soil over it. Time will tell how well this works.

While we were doing this Kara was working on the ivy along the side fence. The goal was just to clean this up so it looked nicer, but at some point I wondered, what would happen if I messed with some of the vines on the other side of the fence. I pulled on one and the whole thing started to go. Turns out there was a solid 3 feet of dead vines growing on the side of the fence. Unfortnuately this little find meant hours of clean up followed by a future trip to the dump.

The benefit is that the yard actually looks under control and the fence will be much easier to tear down when I am finally ready to level the ground out and put in a nice new vinyl fence. Plus we found this little lizard friend. Or I should say Kara found it and freaked way out, running down her ladder and across the yard. :)

Front Yard Bushes

The front yard was full of succulents, weeds, overgrown bushes, and vines. At the start of this day, we were hoping to get  everything trimmed back to decide how to proceed. After a couple hours of work, we decided to just get rid of it all, moving towards a blank canvas. First we began weeding the main yard full of vines and digging up stumps from dead bushes near the house. Then, I cut down the two bushes bordering the walkway while Kara continued pulling vines and trimming back the vine plants near the fence to reveal another bush. We ripped out the third bush and cleaned up the rest of the front yard, leaving the side yard for another day. In the end we had around 12 bags of debris.

Family Room Decorating

Over the past months I have been gradually trading out my temporary furniture for more long term pieces. First I found and purchased a dark grey couch with tufting and high arms. Then I sought out a pair of wingback chairs that were secretly recliners. I found exactly what I wanted at Macy's and was able to hold out for a good deal. Then I spent a long time picking out a TV stand and ended up leaning towards the unconventional with a buffet from the Martha Stewart Collection, sticking to my trend of waiting for a crazy good deal. Eventually I went on a shopping trip for decor. I found four pillows but only splurged on three of them. And I found a large clock built into an old spotlight, a bicycle and an hour glass. On this trip I also scored a table for between my chairs. Then for Valentine's day I received the pillow that I wanted from Pottery Barn (the dark blue striped one on the left) and a nice coaster set with a monogrammed B, also from Pottery Barn.

Tool Shed

With all of the new tools in my possession, it was finally time to tackle the storage closet. I only wish that I had captured more photos of how horribly gross this closet really was the the time of purchase. The photo on the left is after I had been cleaning for a while, so you can't really see how bad it was.

A couple hours of cleaning later and I have a nice space to keep all my tools and work related gear. This freed up a lot of room in the garage for better organization as well. I used a shelving unit to organize my sports gear, put my golf gear on a new golf rack and put all the bins stacked in front of my car.