Progress on the Deck and Butchering Bushes

Last night, Matt (the master deck builder) and Shane worked on the deck handrails. The one on the stairs going down to the yard is now complete; we just have to put on the balusters so I’ll wait until we do that to post pictures. This means that we now lack only the following items:

• Handrails on the stairs going to the driveway
• Gates at the top of both stairs
• Lattice

I believe that Matt and Shane made plans to work on it sometime next week…I am so ready for it to be done. Have I said that before?

While the deck boys did deck stuff, I got to work on the front yard. I am so proud of myself for starting and almost finishing, I ran out of daylight, this little project all by myself. As you know, on Tuesday night we ripped out all the monkey grass from the front two beds. Last night, I sprayed the area on the left with Roundup, to hopefully kill any monkey grass that may be lurking in the dirt, and started to ‘trim’ the shrubs. I say trim, but I think that it may border on butchering. I think they look good, and look a lot neater, but I’m no plant person. Take a look for yourself:

Before:

After:

I was going with an 'umbrella' technique that I so often hear about on 'Flip This House.' Anybody watch that show? I LOVE IT, and I love the Montelongo family on there...and his tree umbrella-ing. So, did I butcher them? Be honest, I can take it.

I also got a lot of the mulch spread, but only in the front as I ran out of daylight and it is very difficult to spread black mulch in the dark, as you can imagine. If it isn’t raining tonight, I’m going to finish the mulch in the bed on the left and start on the right side. These are prickly holly bushes, so I might not be doing too much pruning. But Shane will be available to help, so maybe he’ll do it. How that works is I point to a limb and tell him to cut it and he crawls in and chops it for me. This actually works quite well because I can stand back and take inventory of the ultimate vision. Yes, I have visions about my yard.

We are also having five more loads of black mulch and three loads of fill dirt delivered today. Why fill dirt? We have a lot of uneven areas around the foundation of our house that we need to slope down so that water doesn’t sit against the house.

Yard work sucks. But I did get to operate a hedge trimmer, which wound up being very anticlimactic. I thought that it would be more like a chainsaw, really dangerous and sharp and 'Jason'-like, but I’m certain that this thing wouldn’t even file down one of my fingernails.