What a MESS!

One of the main reasons we bought our second home, was because we needed a backyard for our wild monkey boys to play. However, our new home's backyard wasn't quite kid friendly. We knew the yard had potential, and we knew that some work would be needed to get it up to par. We just weren't sure of how much work that would be!

This is what our backyard looked like when we bought the house.....

OVERRUN WITH WEEDS!!!

The house was used as a rental when we purchased the home. Fortunately, it was the same tenants for the past 7 years, since the house was built. Unfortunately, they didn't do very well in taking care of the backyard. They kept the rest of the house, and the front yard in good condition, and I am sure they tried to take care of the backyard as well. I am assuming they stopped caring for the backyard when they knew the house was being sold as a "short sale," and they let the weeds just grow. Also, they had two big dogs kennelled in the backyard, and where the kennel was, the dogs dug holes and broke sprinkler heads, pipes, and water lines. 

It has been a process getting the weeds pulled, and transferring rock from where the grass should be to another part of the  backyard. Glad we have two helpers who love to be outside and aren't afraid to get dirty!

Ian has taken the next four days off of work in hopes to get the backyard prepped and ready to lay sod. Unfortunately, he rolled his ankle the first day and so we had to end early. He iced it and elevated it right away, and my mom happened to have a nice ankle brace for him to use. So today we were ready to start work again. There was still some rock to be removed from the grass area, so as we were doing that we found some more water lines in weird locations and broken sprinkler heads. (We were now in the area where the dog's kennel was so we knew there just might be issues there.)

We turned the water on in the back so we could see what pipes were working, and what was the deal with the broken lines. What a mess that turned out to be! I don't think sod will be happening this weekend, which means we will probably have to wait until Spring. Plus water and dirt make MUD, and you can only imagine what that did to our boys!

Well you don't have to imagine, let me just show you....

WHAT A MESS!!!

They loved every second of it, except for the part of them having to be hosed off! But then they got a nice warm bath to make up for the cold hose water.

This is the state our yard is in now...

Ian is locating the water lines, so we can fix the broken heads and get new lines where the dogs had chewed them up. Hopefully we can get it figured out soon without anymore hang ups, so we can give our boys the backyard we moved here for!