The unveiling

I don't know about you, but sometimes I love being a homeowner, and other times I think it sucks. I really enjoy special home projects... when they are finished. But given my proclivity for laziness, I just wish I had enough money to hire someone to just do it all for me!

This brings me to the long-awaited reveal of the Great Backyard Overhaul of 2006. Although we have a pretty sizeable yard, it was pretty plain until last summer, when we finally put in a vinyl fence for the dogs. But what we really needed was a patio... a deck... SOMETHING!

You see, we built our house, brand new, in 2004. Because most builders don't include decks or patios in the standard package, this is what we had:

Just a whole lot of sparse grass (another beef I have with the builder, but I can't get started on that rant right now) and a ghetto looking set of wood steps fashioned by my husband, so the dogs could get outside. Not exactly Better Homes and Gardens, I think.

So we decided to bite the bullet and get a patio. You probably remember my previous rant about installing a stamped concrete patio... and my inability to make ANY DECISION whatsoever related to its design or color. (Actually, thats what you can see in the grass in that pic above... that's me trying to figure out what shape we should make the damn patio).

Anyway, I finally made some decisions (or maybe it was just Jason and the salesman who decided... whatever) and the project got underway. Here's the point where they formed the shape of the patio and were about to pour the concrete. Also the point where I got a headache and nearly panicked about the finality of it all.

But lo and behold, I loved it! So much that I couldn't wait to go out and spend EVEN MORE money and start landscaping around this new centerpiece of the backyard. We could have hired someone to do this for us, but we just couldn't justify spending thousands of dollars on something we could do ourselves.
So, enter endless days of back-breaking labor... scooping and spreading topsoil and mulch, planting trees and plants. And I even bought a patio set that I put together all by myself, thank-you-very-much. In the end... our own little backyard paradise.

Here's a closer look at the patio and landscaping (and Jason's baby, otherwise known as the grill). That odd looking tree is a Weeping Atlas Cypress... it's pretty cool.

Here you can see our new Japanese Snowbell tree, the patio furniture, and some of the fence, too!

Overall, a lot of work, but we are loving it! Yay for grillin' on the patio in the summertime! Hope you all are having a great summer, too!