We Have a Yard!! Whoop Whoop!!

Time for a yard update!!  We have made some MAJOR improvements outside our house since last September.  We’ve had some issues with our yard.  The spot we chose to build on is a nice piece of flat land on top of a mountain.  If you’re familiar with West Virginia, you know how amazing it is to find a large flat lot.  If you’re not familiar with West Virginia, let me give you a little idea of the landscape here.  (Look behind us)

 

You may think of us as crazy for wanting to live somewhere with so many mountains, and to be honest, the winter commute is…. interesting to say the least.  But there is something that draws me to these mountains.  My childhood memories aren’t of beaches, they’re of hiking through the woods and climbing mountains.  They’re not of palm trees, they’re of big oaks and cherry trees and apple trees.  They’re not of salt water, they’re of rivers and streams.  This is who I am.  I do and always will belong in these mountains.   Chris feels the exact same way, we’re both West Virginians born and raised.  So when we got married and began to plan our life, there was never a question of moving out of West Virginia.  We knew we would live here.  Okay… now that I’ve thoroughly shown my inner thoughts about WV, back to the yard update.

 When we decided to build here, the lot looked like this.

 

 

 

Nothing but woods, woods and more woods.  But it was flat underneath all of those trees and we could see the potential.  The first step was to have the property logged.  We own 10 acres up here and we wanted to have some woods, so we had about 3 logged.  So, what I didn’t know about logging (and really never cared to know until we got to that point) was that they take the tree trunk, but leave the stumps and the tree tops.  After they were finished logging, we were left with this.
 

We’ve been in the house for 3 years and it took us literally 2 ½ years to get all of the stumps out.  As of last Fall, this is what we were dealing with.  The picture really doesn't do it justice.  There were stumps everywhere.

 

When I had the baby in September, Chris took some time off work to be home with us.  Since it’s really, really rare for us to have time off work and be home, we took advantage of it.  We rented a super big backhoe and decided to get this thing done!  It took a week of Chris working on the backhoe for nearly 8 hours a day. 

 

When Spring rolled around, we were ready for grass.  We haven’t had a great track record with grass…  When we first moved in, we planted grass in a little area in front of the house to avoid mud.  Well, the grass grew in patches…. Then half of it died, we think there wasn’t very much top soil and it just got washed away by rain.  So the following year, we covered it all with new top soil and re-planted.  It still came in patchy, but over time it filled in.  Given our experiences, we were both surprised when we planted the whole yard and it actually grew!  All of it!  Not just patches!  We’re so happy with the yard now, it’s turned into what we dreamed it could be when we first looked at that wooded lot. 

 

We still have some landscaping we want to do, but for right now, we’re just happy to finally have a yard.  A yard with no stumps and rocks and mud :)

-Brooke