The Yard - Part II

We have grass! After a ton of help from my brother John and his friend Kaleb last weekend (they dug up about 3 tons of gravel from our backyard and put it in a huge pile at the back of the yard by the alley) we were ready to put down some new dirt and lay sod.

I took the day off work on Friday and finished getting the dirt ready. This was a lot more work than I anticipated, my back was aching like crazy after shoveling and smoothing the dirt flat all over the yard, and then fertilizing it.

By Friday mid-morning it was ready for the sod! I had gone to Home Depot in West Seattle on Wednesday night and a helpful gal helped me get the sod all ordered (to be delivered Friday). The sod came from JB Sod which is in woodinville, but was contracted through Home Depot in West Seattle to be delivered to us, it worked out great. Our neighbor came over while I was installing it to chat, and she mentioned they had sod professionally put in their whole front lawn a few years ago, and they had paid about $5k to have it all done. Our lawn is about 700 sq feet, and we did 500 sq feet of new sod where the gravel used to be.... and with the dirt and sod both it cost us about $400... and of course lots of hard labor. It will be worth it though, it is already looking great and we are really proud.

Lots of thanks to our wonderful families for coming over and helping over the last couple weeks, we appreciate the hard labor you have contributed. =)

Pretty new flowers my mom planted in our flower planters.


So we cleaned out the shed in our backyard to make room for our new Lawn mower, and also decided to clean out part of the "tool/work room" in our basement of all the old paint cans & wide variety of hazardous materials....The house is from 1919 and I think there are cans of paint dating back to when it was first built! haha. My thoughtful dad is taking this all to the hazardous waste facility in Snohomish for us. Thanks Dad!

The Yard - Part I

We have been working on lots of "Yard projects" over the last few weeks...we are quite ambitious and are trying to get them all done before the wedding July 18th... =)

This is a view of our back yard from our back door. You can see at least half the yard was covered in gravel where the previous home-owners would park their RV. We are going to be digging up much of the gravel, putting down new dirt, and laying sod so we will have a larger grassy backyard.

This is also looking out our back door but to the right side. This faces the main road (Barton) so we are eager to put in a fence to give us some privacy and cut down on the noise. We got a few estimates from fence companies to fence in our whole backyard and they all came in at about $3k. Although it'd be really nice to have someone do it all in one day... we decided we can do this project ourselves and it is only costing us about $1,ooo (cedar posts, wood, and cement from Home Depot, as well as a few other supplies and lots of back breaking labor)... what a deal!
Same side of the house from the opposite view.
The "Old Fence" coming down (calling it a fence is being generous... it was really random pieces of old wood...). It'll make great firewood.

Happy Summer in Seattle...Finally!

It was a great weekend, we had a fun time at the Solstice Festival in Fremont on Saturday, and a very productive Sunday working on the yard.

Saturday started off gloomy but brightened up throughout the day and overall stayed nice with no rain all day long! Fremont's Solstice Festival was fun as always... we missed the parade (which I was not too bummed about...nudity on bikes is overrated), but we saw lots of fun arts & crafts and yummy local food. We then headed to our friend Joel's office in Fremont, where the folks at SSA Acoustics had a Solstice Party. It was great food and friends, and we even got to hear Joel's band play! They were AWESOME, a Radiohead cover band called the Backdrifters, I can't wait to catch their next show.

Here are a couple cute pic's of our house's flowers in bloom.