Backyard progress

There's been slow and steady progress made on the backyard over the last two weeks. The old patio, planter box and gardens have been removed. The lilac and mock orange bushes were moved to the vegetable gardens at the back of the yard and seem to have survived. I still have to figure out where I plan to move them permanently.

The view from the back of the house now looks like this.

The footings for the deck are in and the sod is removed where the ground level patio will be. We ordered the stone for it on Monday, so hopefully it won't be too long before it can be installed. We decided to go with 2'x3' black sandstone.

We're pouring a concrete pad the width of the backyard for the 12' out from the house that the deck will cover. We plan to use it for storage for things like our winter tires, the assorted Thule racks we have for the top of the car, etc. All the stuff we would normally store in our non-existent garage. They're coming to pour the concrete pad today, so hopefully start building the deck next week.

Now that the weather's warm I'm chomping at the bit to get started on some gardens out back. Last weekend I got the front garden into some semblance of order, with some new plants put in and mulch down so it's looking nice and orderly out front, even though it's a disaster out back.

I also spent a few hours on Monday cleaning out around the outside of the shed. Which is in desperate need of a new paint job this year.

I put down river stone along the left side of it a number of years ago, but it had become totally filled with leaves and maple keys, and it was impossible to keep the weeds down.

So I spent about three hours on Monday morning picking up all of the stones and separating them from the vegetation. It was incredibly tedious, and I felt like shovelling the whole mess into the garbage, but the city won't take rock, so I had no choice. It's all done now, though.

I plan to put down large patio stones along the side of the shed so it's easy to keep the vegetation down. I have no idea yet what I'll do with the river stone, but I'm sure I'll find some use for it. It's back behind the shed now, out of my sight, so there's no big rush to decide.