Lost in the landscaping

I logged on to blog  this morning and discovered it has been a month since I last wrote. *hanging head in shame* All I can say is that I have been overcome by a busy life. Not a moment to spare for a random thought to float through my mind, much less to snatch on to it and direct it through my fingers. And yet, I may be worn out, but I am coming through to the other side.

Let's go back a month...

Eric and I spent his spring break working on our backyard landscaping. We had ambitious plans for the week and pushed ourselves to the limit to get almost all of it done.  Starting Saturday, we woke up, got the kids dressed and fed, and then basically spent the rest of the day until dinner hard at work.

In the end we cut out almost a quarter acre of sod, moved some, hauled the rest away in 3 very full trailer loads and then unloaded them. Talk about sore! We tackled the unusable, weedy dog run and made it clean and useable.  Eric moved or capped around 8 sprinkler heads. We replaced sod in the flooded part of the yard.  We marked area for our patio extension.  We ordered and received 5 trucks of mulch, 1 truck of gravel and 1 truck of playground chips. Spread all of that lovely ground cover.  And, in the last 2 weekends we built the kids play structure.  We've gotten bids and scheduled work for the patio extension and concrete curbing. We've priced trees for our landscaping.

Some pics...

Before....

During...

 

After...

I will admit that during our work, there were many times that we concluded we were really insane to take on such a big project on our own.  Two thoughts kept me going:

Number One, the logical rationale: We are doing these improvements on a tight budget and the more work we do ourselves, the further we can stretch our money when making these changes.  I kept saying, "We could be paying someone $30/hr. to be doing this for us." True, after loading 2 trailers full of sod and seeing we had another load left, the following thought was, "$30/hr really isn't that unreasonable!" But, we pressed on and our reward is that we actually have some money left for some trees and flowers!

Number Two, the illogical, but more fun, rationale: As I was chucking sod on to the trailer, I was reminded of multiple challenges on The Amazing Race that essentially involve "finding a needle in a haystack" and how some of those tasks apparently go on for hours and hours. I decided to think of the sod carrying and throwing as a task from The Amazing Race. "If I load all of these sod rolls before the other team, I will get to the mat first and hear Phil say, 'Amanda and Eric, you are the first team to arrive! You have won ONE MILLION DOLLARS!'" Looking back now, I was clearly insane from exhaustion. But, at the time, it was the quirky motivation I needed to press on. 

However we got through it, a majority of our backyard work is now complete.  It has been really nice the past few days to be able to go out there in the sun and really take pleasure in the yard we created.