An Unsightly View...

This is a view of the front yard on the left side. There is the piece of log that was never removed. What an eyesore! The tree is another Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum). This area is a gentle slope of about 3 to 3 ½ feet. I am considering planting some evergreen trees or shrubs there to hide the nasty view. The house next door is a rental and the landlord (slumlord actually) never does any repairs or maintenance on the place. How do you like the blue and green tarp covered leanto?

Some people are like slinkies...

Not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one stumble down the stairs. (Unknown)

And believe me we did our share of stumbling last winter so that is why I made this first attempt at making easy to walk down stairs. This also is a view of the parking pad and retaining wall. As you can see when we had the parking pad made it pretty much denuded the area of any plant life, except a wild hydrangea bush and a couple of irises. In front of the car you can see what remains of the stump from the oak tree that was felled and left in the yard by a previous owner. The river rocks were brought in by the people we bought the house from. At the top of the stairs you can still see a portion of what used to be the driveway.

A Path That Leads to Nowhere...

This is a view of the lower yard near the front door. It was mostly covered by asphalt when we moved in. I had to place a berm where the rocks are to keep the rainwater from washing away the yard. Just below the propane tank the dirt poured out onto a lovely set of steps and a pathway made out of rocks that led to the backyard. There was another large tree in the corner just opposite or the propane tank that one of the previous owners had cut down to a stump. The ground, shown in the lower right hand corner, is about 3 feet higher than the pathway and is held in place by a rock wall. The other side of the path is bordered by another, lower, rock wall and there is vinca planted all over there; it’s also where the maple and evergreen trees are planted.

A slippery slope

This is the view from the front door looking up the yard to street level. It is an even slope, and used to be filled with native ferns before we had to have the septic system replaced after that the yard never looked the same. They had a lot of excess dirt and when they tried to place it evenly around it killed all the plants. The ferns are making a slow comeback but it will take years for them to fill back in if ever.

A Closer Look...

This is a close up of the same side. You have a closer look at both of the biscuits (a section of log), and you can see one of the evergreen trees that were there before we moved in. Unfortunately, it was later destroyed when we put in the chain link fence; however, this is the very sort of tree I am considering replanting in the same area. I have to be careful what I choose because the power line partially runs over this area.

Things Keep Slipping Away

In this photo you can still see the stairs to the deck on the right side of the house, and the rickety fence that surrounds the property. There is a row of evergreen trees (look like pine trees) on the right side of the lot, but most of them were still small, so I had to stake them to keep them from growing sideways down the embankment. That split rail fence section is on our property line, and that is the only piece of it anywhere on the lot. All along that embankment there grows a shrub with a leaf shaped like a heart; it's fuzzy, and coarse, and I have no idea what it is I only know that in the summer grows so densely it hides the neighbors yard, and makes a wonderful privacy hedge. It can easily get out of control, and suckers profusely, and if I’m not out there cutting it back once a week it will take over the yard. You will also notice that there are some tree stumps (towards the bottom of the picture)where we cut down pine trees, and we also had both of the Silver Maples pruned back because one was so large it was overhanging onto the neighbors roof, and the other was too dense, and the limbs were entangling themselves with the other tree. You can only see the stump of one because the arborist misunderstood me, and cut the second one all the way down to the ground. I was furious; now it's more like a shrub than a tree

This Deck Has Got To Go

This is a view of the back yard. You can see a section of the old fence, that surrounded the property, running behind the deck. The thing was literally held together with bailing wire in some places, and metal stakes to support the decaying posts. We knew that it wouldn' t make it through another winter so, we had the lot surveyed in preparation for putting in a chain-link fence. The survey showed us that we would have only a foot clearance from the back edge of the deck to the proposed fence so, we decided to tear the deck completely out. It was old and falling apart by that time anyway. Once we got into the project of dismantling the deck we discovered what held the Jacuzzi in place. You can see the cover for it in the center of the deck so you know how far out from the house it stood. Well, whoever put the thing in had used a ton of concrete, rocks, broken bricks, even bathroom tile, and any other debris that they could find to create a retaining wall, of sorts, to keep the thing in place. We knew we would need a jackhammer to bust it out, and we couldn't afford to do that now, and put in a chain-link fence. We realized that after hauling off the deck, and the cut up Jacuzzi we were going to be left with this hideous concrete eyesore for awhile. It turned out to be 7 years until we finally could pay to have it broken out.

At this point I might also mention that I had spent several weeks that spring raking up pine needles and yard debris. One of the first notifications that we received after moving in came from the fire department informing us that the yard was to be cleared of debris down to the dirt. There was at least a 6-inch thick layer of junk around the entire yard. The oposite side of the yard had wild blackberry bushes gone mad everywhere and a poinsetta "bush" that was five feet high in the middle of the mess. It took me the better part of a week to prune, cut, and haul all of that out. I worked so hard that first year.

All that hard work paid off and as you can see on this side of the yard all of the mess is gone. That huge blue tarp covered monstrosity was no longer there because we burned a lot of the wood that was under it that first winter, and what was left we put in a stacker. After I had raked up all the junk I made rock pathways, and made a planter underneath the cypress tree that you can see on the left, the irony of it all was that I did all that work and most of the yard wasn't our land. Go figure!

It's A Barren Wasteland

This is another view of the yard taken from the parking pad looking across the yard at the neighbors cabin. That whole barren area used to be filled with tiny pine tree saplings and weeds. We discovered after our first summer that weed abatement and fire prevention were big concerns up here so , we cleared a lot of the greenery out of this area but, looking at the yard now we were wondering if we had done such a good thing. That is an American Sycamore on the far right up by the street, in the fall it turns a beautiful gold. In the same area we had to put sandbags because there is no curb to direct the rainwater and it washes out that side of the yard. Towards the middle of the bottom of the photo there are still some pieces of asphalt from the driveway.

What Next?

The yard looks pretty much denuded at this point but it is early spring and things don’t start to bud until May. We cut down the black locust tree over the door which opened up the front of the house and now you can see that there is a window up there. The front yard gets a lot of sun unlike the backyard which is usually in shade all day. I have given some serious thought to hiring a professional landscaper to design a yard for us, and then to do all the planting ourselves.

The Journey Begins...

A lot happened in the first year...after breaking out the driveway last summer, and having the tree's cleared we focused on getting an area for a parking pad up on the street. Having suffered through the winter struggling to find a parking place we were ready for a change. You'll notice that on the left side of the picture we used a lot of treated logs as a retaining wall. In the grassy berm right behind it, there was a huge section of an oak tree that had been cut down and left to rot; at the same time we had the area for the parking pad cleared we had the log dragged up to the street. However, a couple of sections rolled down into the yard ( you see them there) and the guy never came back to lift them out as he promised to so, there they sat for a couple of years. We paid someone else to cut the log on the street into biscuits, and then we split them ourselves with an ax and a wedge. We did things the hard way in the beginning. Notice the wood fence panel? Well, behind that was the most delapitated tin shed you'd ever want to see. We kept it because that was all the storage we had. We moved from a 3 bedroom, 2 car garage house in Anahiem, to this small one bedroom cabin with no garage so, we had to use any storage we could find.