Relax, it took our parents years!

While looking at our front yard the other day, I realized that it was time to revamp something we had done previously. It was time to do something outside anyway because it's the time of year when it's not too hot and not too cold, and you can stand to be outside for lenghthy periods of time without being uncomfortable. I also have a rule about alternating inside and outside improvements to the house to keep everything on an even keel. Here's what we had done previously in the yard. Just after we moved in, I purchased two boxes of landscape lights because I wanted some and they were on sale. They were the wired, plug in type because sometimes it's not sunny and your solar lights don't charge and when you come in at night the lights have about the wattage of a lightning bug and you trip on the sidewalk trying to get to the front door. We had these lights for about a year and a half. In the box. In the shed. That's a good place for them, right? No, I didn't think so either. So we decided to do a late fall project last year and put the lights in the yard. We plotted where we'd want our eventual flower bed to go, and installed the lights according to what were envisioning for the future so that we wouldn't have to redo the lights. To cover the cords for the lights, we bought several bags of mulch and made a fake flowerbed. Classy, huh? It actually didn't look too bad until this spring when the grass started growing. You can't mow or weedeat in mulch, at least not without significant risk of injury to yourself and anything in the general vicinity, from flying pieces of bark. The grass that was growing in the mulch was some of our "real and good grass" (with very hearty roots which makes it very hard to pull up) that apparently the previous homeowner kinda sorta seeded with in hopes that it would eventually spread and cover the yard. This has not worked to date. In fact, it makes the yard look stupid because we have a patch of actual grass in the front yard near the house, and then the typical mixed grass consisting mostly of clover and dandelions in the rest of the yard. This real grass takes forever to get green and causes us to have green grass in the typical areas, and a dead lawn in the real area until way late in spring. The real grass, however, is incredibly resilient, and hard to kill. If only it were nice to walk on like our neighbor's lawn (which really deserves the title lawn and not yard). Henry has a goal to someday have a super nice "lawn" with thick soft pretty grass that's nice to walk on. So given that we had this mulched, grassy, well lit area in our yard, I decided that now was the time to re-do it right. I thought about all those yards I've seen where people start things and either do them wrong or don't finish them, and the home owners had such good intentions and the projects had such potential, but in the end the yard looks like crap. I didn't want to be one of those people. I wanted to take care of the project and make it an assett, not a liability. I choose to think that when I make positive improvements to my house, it elevates the standards and standings of my entire neighborhood. I mean c'mon, you've seen the pictures, you know what it looked like before. My neighbors were actually honking and cheering while we cut down trees and painted the house! No joke! Anyway, I have spent the last two days altering this project so that my neighbors won't drive by and think "if only they had... it could have been so nice". I plucked the lights from the grass, raked out the mulch, and started digging scraping. I used my shovel like a sod cutter (which I seriously wished I had) and peeled the grass from the dirt like the rind from an orange. If you have ever done this, you know that it is very hard work. After I removed the grass and most of its roots, I put down a layer of plastic (haha grass, grow through that!) I also installed some of that black plastic edging stuff to provide a barrier between the mulch and the grass- mulch in, grass out, no cross contamination. I had to dig a trench so that I could put it in correctly, and I'll be honest and say that I misused the claw of a hammer for this purpose. To make matters worse for myself, I decided to expand the flower bed and make it go across the front of the house under the big windows. I envision pretty flowers blooming there next year. Henry was kind enough to help me with the last little bit of the project when he got home. I even found a purpose for the grass and dirt that I removed from the flower beds. I used them to fill in weird areas of the yard that don't grow grass for whatever reason. Win win! I have a sunburn because even though I bought two new bottles of sunblock, I neglected to use either of them to mist my exposed body parts. I also have a blister on the palm of my hand (yes I wore gloves, but in the end it did not matter) that I'm nursing by holding the margaritta that Henry made me for a job well done. We were going to get some free mulch from a guy on craigslist but he lived too far away, so tomorrow we will just go buy some. We would have spent the money in gas anyway, and had to shovel the mulch twice on top of that. Next week I will go to a friends house, shovel in hand, to collect some of her monkey grass that I will then transplant into my flowerless flower beds. She says she has too much and doesn't really like it so it helps us both out. I view monkey (and mondo) grass like a ponytail, it doesn't really have much of a wow factor, but it at least looks like you tried. In the midst of all this work, I glanced at some of my neighbor's yards. They are perfectly manacured, with pretty flowers beds with little chotchkies sprinkled in them, and their houses are all well cared for and they have nice mailboxes and lawnboys who do most of the work because they are old now. *sigh* Anyway, I thought about my parents' house and how they always seemed to have everything and I who was just starting out, had seemingly nothing. I borrowed their stuff constantly to help me out in my endeavors. Sometimes, I even returned what I borrowed before they had to ask for it back. I used to think about how they had everything, and it seemed like magic. I felt that I had to do something magical so that I could acquire duplicates of what they had really fast. I heard people say "you're just starting out, you'll get there", but it didn't matter because I wanted it all yesterday. Today it really sunk in what they were saying, even though I knew it all along. It took our parents years of hard work and collecting to get what they have. It didn't happen overnight, it just seemed that way because by the time I was old enough to notice, it was already there. I felt relaxed by this ephiphony. Our neighbor's kid was in their front yard with her prom date, our kids were running around in the yard covered in dirt and grass, and I told Henry that by the time our kids were big enough to go to prom, maybe our yard would look nice enough to take cool pictures in. His response was "well if not, at least the house will be paid for". That wasn't really what I had in mind, but the then thought did occur to me that if we didn't have a mortgage payment, we'd have alot of money each month to invest in things like... relandscaping the yard before the kids go to prom. I'm no longer in a hurry to have a great house or yard immediately. Some people buy one that's great, and that's great for them. Personally, we wanted to put our own stamp on things, and that takes time to both earn the money, and then to complete the projects. We have years to fix up what we have and make it our own, and by then we will be old enough to have it and be able to fully appreciate the satisfaction that our hardwork brings.