Backyard Boot Camp

Let me preface this with saying that this was a HUGE project! It doesn't look like much from the pictures, but man was this a beast. I'm so glad we had the whole week to work on it. First thing up was for Tony to aerate the yard. He and some of the other neighborhood husbands rented an aerator to help our yard drain better and promote prettier grass (lots of other technical reasons, but I'm a girl and this is what I say it does). I left on Saturday to Houston to try on bridesmaid dresses for my friend Megan's wedding. This is what I left:

These little holes are what I came home to all over the front and back yard Saturday afternoon. These holes will help the soil breathe and make the grass pretty (again, I'm a girl and this is how I break technical stuff down to).

Our plan was to make a really large flower bed that went the span of our back fence. We want to put in some native Texas shrubs and plants and one day a tiered water fountain. Here's our boring backyard before all the work started:

In order to do this we had to tear up the sod all along the fence line. To do this, Tony started out with our edger to make a line of where we wanted the flower bed to be.

After our initial plan of digging up the grass with a shovel failed miserably, I convinced Tony to go rent a sod cutter to get this business done quickly! Tony is such a boy and LOVES any kind of landscaping machinery so he got really excited when he realized he was going to learn how to work a new toy. He watched some videos on how to use it, and watched a few DVR'd yard shows for confidence and he was off!

A couple of hours later the sod was cut and it was time for the hard work.

We rolled up so much sod and good night it was heavy! Good thing for us that the lot behind us is still empty, so we tossed them over the fence. I have never had a workout this tough in all my years of playing sports. I found new muscles I didn't even know I had (primarily in my hamstrings, triceps, and abs) and I made them very sore! After hours of work here is what it looked like:

My hands looked like this for days!

The next thing to do was to get the dirt we would need to make our garden really healthy. Our soil is clay soil and Tony wanted to make sure we brought in really good soil to help with drainage and nutrients. We went to the landscape yard and bought four truckloads of dirt to haul into the flower beds.

Imagine this:

four times. Each load is about 2,000 pounds of dirt that we brought home, shoveled into wheelbarrows, hauled into the backyard and leveled out where the beds will be. So after it was all said and done we had unloaded about 8,000 pounds of dirt together. Big project...huge! Our neighbors kept asking us if we were burying dead bodies in the backyard with all that dirt!

Here are the beds as of now. We ran out of time and pretty weather to actually plant the flowers and shrubs. We plan on doing this in the next couple of weekends as well as bringing in mulch to finish it out.

Even though this project was so big and difficult, I am so glad we did it together. I get what people mean now when they say it was a labor of love. I love so much that Tony works so hard to make our home a beautiful place to be. He spends so much time and energy making my visions come alive and it's a huge reason why home is my number one favorite place to be in our free time. He's my hero and this project made our marriage so much stronger because we worked on a common goal even when most would quit. It also gave us a chance to laugh a lot, curse a little (me), spend time together, and make our house more of a home. I'm so lucky for him and for this memory we'll always have!