Day Three-seventy-eight: Tis the season

With the weather continuing to cooperate we redoubled our efforts to complete all the outside tidying and finished just in the Saint Nick of time. Much digging, clearing, pruning, bagging, mulching, and spreading later and we've achieved a nearly Japanese style yard (completely unintentionally). One thing we have learned is that two cubic yards of rocks goes a LONG way.

Here's what the back of the house now looks like. Far better than when we last left it.

And here's the side of the house that continues the work we did to the front. We don't have good before photos but the dozen or so bushes that we cut down were about 6 feet high, 4-6 feet wide, and 3-4 feet deep each. Now they're all about a foot high and will be easy to keep pruned once per year. After everything came down we had a "there's a house hidden in here" moment. Another advantage is allowing sunlight into the basement window.

Here's the final product. As with the front, we put down new cedar mulch. If this were a scratch-n-sniff you'd know how nice this smells now.

So regular readers will recall that about six months ago we cleared a good deal of junk from behind the garage. This is what we started with, about a decade's worth of firewood (much of it rotten from being in a pile for so long) and a decrepit old metal shed.

We got it to this state in June...

And here's where we are today. All the old wood boards and pallets that we beneath the firewood (and very rotten) are gone, the grade away from the garage has been improved, various and sundry other pieces of trash are also absent now.

For good measure, we cleaned out the ivy and other junk on the side of the garage, regraded it, and put down some more of our endless supply of rocks.

Finally, some may wonder what has become of all of the trash that we've removed? We've taken away numerous bags but the picture below is the most dramatic. It includes all the cut branches from the bushes we took away from the side of the house.