Joy 16/82: Guardian Angels

My backyard is destroyed ... deliberately.  It was a chaotic hodge-podge; now it's a muddy wasteland.  There were five different surfaces ... ugly hand-made brick, concrete, pea gravel, river rock and, in the middle, a square of red pavers under a free standing pergola that had no rhyme or reason.  Oh and a prize candidate for the ugly fountain contest.

My first thought was to just bulldoze everything and start over, but then reason took over so I started taking things out.  A raised garden, an apple tree with no room to grow, a small pine tree that would take over the yard if it did grow, all the ground surfaces.  I thought I'd be able to stop there, but, no, the pergola has to go and also the patio overhang.  Next week the bull dozer comes after all.

But, the fun part is trying to figure out what to make out of the blank canvas that's left.  Conversations with several landscape people have made my head spin ... deck, flagstone, pavers, french drains, retaining walls, etc. etc.  But tomorrow I get to go shopping for rocks ... how cool.

Probably the most joyous part of this is that it is the only thing that really needs to be done to this house.  The one I tried to buy, the one I thought I was in love with, the one the bank owned and refused to negotiate on, had a list of projects like this that would have kept me busy, and broke, for years.  Every once in awhile I just say a quiet thank you to the Universe, or my Guardian Angels, for having more sense than I had.

About the image:  This is one of the before pictures ... it doesn't give you a complete sense of how jumbled it was.  We'll see if it looks better when everything is done.