Enjoying the Fruits of Our Labors

We have been living in our house for two years now. I can't believe it! Clint asked me the other day if I wished we would have rented for six more months and let the house prices drop more. We could have been in a bigger house for the same money. I would love a little more space, but I wouldn't trade now. I love the neighborhood that we live in and we have put a lot in to this house--mostly the yard. When we moved in the middle of July, the back yard was a gradual slope from the house up to the back fence raising about three feet. It was full of lovely weeds with no fence on one side.
We got to work right away on the fence and a few months later paid a guy to grade the backyard. Ahhh! A nice flat backyard of dusty dirt with a huge dirt pile in the back is so much better than the weeds, right????




Then the next spring we laid sod and Clint went to work with his super power of being extremely meticulous and built the worlds straightest retaining wall. It was not my favorite winter with four boys and a big dog and a backyard that was muddy and virtually useless so I was ecstatic to finally get sod to cover at least part of the dirt.





The projects have not slowed down since then. Clint built an awesome fort up on the retaining wall, a sandbox, and we hauled an insane amount of decorative rock into the backyard. Our final touch for this spring was to get all of our garden boxes ready to go. I am so excited to grow something besides weed in the garden (we were very successful weed-growers last summer.) We have two hybrid apple trees that each grow five kinds of apples, three raspberry bushes, one blackberry, one grape vine, two hanging baskets of strawberries, and so far we have onions, potatoes, peas, spinach, and cabbage planted. We just have to finish up the sprinklers to the boxes and we can finally slow down with the projects for a while. . . at least that's what we tell ourselves. I don't think they ever really slow down!