The before...

I know it has been a long time since we have updated the blog. Poor Bryon has been studying like crazy, and Maggie has been working on planning the next major project that we are doing at our house. (Which will happen next weekend).

Next weekend we are planning on completely landscaping our back patio. And when I say back patio, I mean all along the back of the house and around the patio. Not only that, but we are going to correct some grading issues that we had (causing some foundations problems (more on that in a minute). In a couple of weeks (probably either Labor Day weekend or the weekend after) we will use a temporary fence and block off half of the back yard (poor Roxie won't know what to do) and we are going to re-seed half of the back yard and hope (fingers crossed) that we will have success the first time instead of having to re-do it like we had to 3 times with the front yard.

Anyway...the before pictures:

This is the view of the back patio from earlier this summer (only slightly...okay REALLY overgrown with weeds)
This is the area around the air conditioner. We had to block off part of it to make sure that Roxie couldn't get to any of the wires or connections.
The view looking left from the patio.

The view looking right from the patio.

A closer view of the weeds.The view of the part of the backyard that we are going to strip and replace. We had the trees trimmed earlier this summer, which we think *might* make it where grass will actually grow here now.
Another view of the part of the yard we are going to re-do. What you see there now is completely covered in weeds. This was taken before the foundation repair. Now this has been completely stripped and the foundation was repaired (see the next part of the blog.)
In mid-July, we had one wall on our foundation repaired. Although we didn't get a lot of pictures during, I was amused around 1 pm at the pure amount of machinery that was in front of the house and in the yard. We had a bobcat (which broke down), a cement truck, the bobcat repair person, a structural engineer and I think a few others, all at the house at the same time...so I took pictures. Luckily, they didn't hurt the yard too much (especially after all of the work we have put into the yard the past few years).