The yard is coming along

We hired a landscaping company for a couple of projects:

• The patio needed to be cleaned quite badly
• The hack job of a path behind the garage was both unsafe and ugly
• We wanted to have the beds along the sides and back of the yard moved closer to the lot line (we do NOT need giant beds full of weeds)
• We also wanted some sort transition from the path to a less structured walkway toward the garage

Most of these projects were beyond our skills and also our equipment. We don't own any sort of tiny bulldozer or the tool this company used to cut the narrow trench for the new beds. We might have been able to clean the patio, but probably not nearly as well or as efficiently as they did. And we sure wouldn't have solved the down spout issue on the side of the garage.

Here are some before/after photos:

Dirty bricks and filthy chimenea:

Hack job of a path from the previous owner (which we tried & failed to fix):

It's just an ankle twist waiting to happen:

See the chain link fence? That area was full of weeds and the downspout couldn't do a great job (downspout is off camera to the left):

Clean! And the fish is too!

Another view; also gone is the honking big grill that we used once in the last eight years. They said they have a graveyard of old grills:

Looking toward the new path:

From the path back to the patio:

New stepping stones which are shaped like slices of wood:

New sod and we hope it gets enough light that it doesn't die (we also need to trim back those bushes, that will help a lot):

MUCH improved downspout area! We hadn't even asked about that, they saw the need and did it:

Now winter weather needs to go away so we can put our sun umbrella out and start enjoying this.

Lush and green now

A little compare and contrast for our patio in Boston. I'm no Freshhell with her amazing gardening abilities but we did pretty well here with what we had.

Before:

After:

Sunshine

Yesterday was gorgeous. Since we don't often get days and days of sunshine, we didn't squander our chance to plant our herbs and ferns. I wish this video were better quality because the patio looks lovely and it's very tranquil there. We call it the Grotto when we don't feel light-deprived.

Should work

We've plotted out how to keep water out of our patio when we get the fortunately rare torrential rains. The first step was putting in boards along the outside of our fence down at the bottom. We will be grading the parking spots and hauling in gravel to help mitigate the slope from the alley to our patio.

Yesterday, Kent started on another part of the project by pulling up the rotted railroad ties and putting in stones instead.

Remnants

So the apartment still isn’t what I’d call done. Oh the major stuff is—we have walls, appliances, heck we even have beautiful floors. We also have a punch list that’s two pages long. Not a single room is actually finished.

We spent some time yesterday knocking off some of those items and have more to do today. Kent worked repairing our living room windows (which were damaged by the nor’easter we had in March) while I tackled the patio. Since Kent is a redhead and might spontaneously combust in the sunshine, it seemed to be a good distribution of labor.

It’s been easy to overlook how damaged the patio was by all that water because it didn’t affect our living space, and I mostly just see it as I come and go to work. The patio is one of the major reasons we bought this apartment—we really wanted some outdoor space and that’s very hard to come by in Boston.

Our patio is mostly brick with a band of growing space along three of the four sides, and it’s also two levels. The upper level is closest to the alley, and the lower level is partially under the balcony of the apartment upstairs. We’d put in a lot of shade-loving ground cover and I must say the ivy appears to have loved being nearly drowned because it’s growing like crazy.

We’d also planted herbs and flowers in colorful pots that we could move to chase the sun around the patio. Some of the pots had broken or were so damaged I had to toss them and in all cases the soil in them ended up being packed in there like cement. So I had to use a trowel to break up the soil. We’ve got a storage chest we store those kinds of tools in—it’s about five feet long, stands not quite three feet high and is probably a couple of feet deep. When I opened the lid, I realized that it still had water in it from the flood. Everything in there was covered with silt and grime and the water line was obvious both on that and also on our grill (which we still need to check to see if it works).

I swept up a lot of sand from the lower level, so at some point we’ll need to redo those bricks. I look forward to the day when I don’t see any reminders of that stupid flood.