What We've Been Up To

Getting a new job has brought Paul back to life and he is so much more motivated to start on projects.  He is running a marathon in March and has thus far ran 20 miles at one time!  This is amazing to me as I am clearly no runner.  We also started the monstrous task of cleaning out our backyard.  Paul and I still can't figure out what we were thinking when we looked at a "wooded" backyard and said, "great, we won't have to take care of a yard!"  Maybe it's because Hayden was barely walking and we didn't think how great a backyard is for a child.  Anyway, now we are stuck cleaning up this ridiculously huge backyard filled with messy trees and weeds.  Last Saturday Paul and 2 friends came with chainsaws and took down about 14 trees!

They only did the smaller ones close to our house and the bigger ones farther away. So there are still more to go, but at least we made a dent.  The following Monday Paul had off, so we hired some young men from our ward and they helped us clean up a bunch of the debris into the dumpster.  They also got to demolition the old hot tub fenced in area which they really seemed to enjoy!

So after all that work, we still have this to clean up.  We ran out of room in the dumpster, so we are thinking of building a fire pit and burning the rest...

We found piles and piles of bricks hidden under leaves, it was crazy!

We still want to take down about 6 more trees, the ones in the middle behind the pile of branches.  That would make a pretty big open area to put down sod and have a nice backyard.  This project is really hard for me.  I'm the type of person that wants to start and end a project within a few days.  Get in and get it done.  This is going to take awhile and it is so hard for me to look out my back windows and see this mess!  I am having a professional tree company come look at the other trees close to our house to get an estimate of how much it will be to take them down.  One step at a time I guess.  Hopefully by summer I'll have some awesome pictures of our new backyard!