Ugh, manual labor.....

I have never been one to shy away from doing home improvement stuff.  I have never been one to say that if I am going to sweat a little or break a nail (or all 10 of them) I won't help B around the house.  What I guess I didn't realize when we bought our little slice of the country in the city is that our money literally wouldn't get us anywhere when it came to landscaping!  We had a budget in mind when we started this process on what we wanted to spend on the landscaping, and getting grass in as soon as possible was a must; anytime it rained or even misted, our entire place turned into a giant mud pit!  Hahaha, what a laugh that budget was.  We had to seriously reevaluate some things and pull money from one place and put it into the landscaping budget.  We also had to decided that there were somethings that we just couldn't do ourselves, and that our time was better spent doing other smaller things related to the landscaping.

So we set off looking for a landscape company to help us get the infrastructure and the area directly surrounding the house done.  We found Castlewood Landscape.  Nick was great at getting the vision we wanted and helped us fix some things that wouldn't work.  He and his subcontractors A Affordable Landscape set to work in turning our dirt into beautiful grass and paths surrounding the house.

Take a look at the really ugly befores!

 So the guys set to work and in about two weeks time, they had turned our barren wasteland into a beautiful yard!

 The guys did a phenomenal job, but B and I had to pick up where they left off, mostly because it was cheaper for us to buy and plant the plants and trees ourselves!  So off we went to the Tree Farm and bought a few trees, flowers and grass plants.  I don't think that B or I anticipated how much work it was going to take to plant everything!

We got a lot of work done for this being our first summer in the house, but we absolutely have a lot more to go.  I'm so happy that we finally have grass though, the kids needed a place to run and have fun that wasn't just a pile of dirt!