Yard Improvements

We've been doing a lot to improve the yard and exterior of our home this year. One of the benefits of being retired is having time in the day all through the week.

 Earlier we posted about the two trees we had removed.  We also pulled out this one bush from the front yard.  This allowed us to widen the grassy area and open up the front yard.

 First I dug a trench around the bush, then down and under as far as could be reached.  Next I hooked a tow line up to the car and pulled the bush out of the dirt.

 This gives an idea of how large the bush is.  We hauled it around to the back yard.

 Here it is in it's new home by the shed.

 Meanwhile Jacquelyn repainted one of our statues, the little boy fishing in the pond.

 She also removed all the rust from our fire cooker and repainted it with black.

 One the deck we lined up some tree sections from our tree that we'd cut down.  They make nice seats.

 We took out the canopy from our back patio area.  Shown here with the restored fire pit.

 Another big job was the roof.  This one took the most time and involved scrapping off all the moss that was growing there.  Caleb did most of this work, but Jacquelyn and I were up on the roof for many an hour too.

 Then we had a dump truck load of beauty bark delivered.

 Caleb loading up a wheel barrow of beauty bark for the non-grass areas of the yard.

 First we had to weed all the non-grass areas, then put down black weed resistant material, as you can see in front of the living room window.  Then we spread beauty bark on top.  It should make the yard weed resistant so it won't need much yard maintenance work in the future.

 A section of the back yard with new beauty bark.

Right now we are tackling the ponds.  All the pine needles and dirt had to be cleaned out from between the rocks.  Then we added foaming bleach to kill the algae.  After that the rocks from the bottom of the pond were all taken ouot so we could get all the dirt and dead fall removed.  After this the only thing left will be new grass, but that will have to wait until the fall.