Home Remodel Stage 2: Flourish

So one might think that when renovating a home, the yard comes dead last in terms of importance. Not so in our case.

You may remember from my first home remodel post that Flourish (landscaping) was supposed to be stage four. The original plan was to wait until the house was finished before we started landscaping but since the weather has been a tad warmer and the house won't be done until the end of summer, we decided to do the yard now so we can enjoy it during the warm months.

Our huge grassy yard

Turns out my husband is a landscaping genius. I look at our backyard and see a huge grassy area with no idea where to start. He looks back there and sees all kinds of potential. So a few weekends ago he measured everything and then started mapping out what the backyard will look like.

Our yard layout. The yard is at the top, house at the bottom.

The basic idea is to have a deck attached to the house and then a big open grassy area up to the trees. Behind the trees will be a fire pit and a bunch of planters and then to the other side we'll put in a vegetable garden. There will be a brick path that goes along side where the existing garage is (that will end up just being a concrete pad to park an unused car, or a boat if we had one.) and winds through the yard to the fire pit. And if all goes as planned will do an in ground trampoline in between the vegetable garden and the concrete pad.


So to start off we figured out where we wanted the path to go and Chris started digging out the fire pit.

Chris picked up some brick for free from some lady who was moving but we still need more to finish the whole pathway. We have about a third of what we need.

It's all different colors and it's used which is gonna give it the rustic look we're going for.

This is how far Chris got in one day:

We laid out rope to show where the path would go.

The tire was our fire pit place marker.

Digging up the grass

The best way to meet the neighbor kids is to dig a hole in your yard.

We didn't take it all the way to the existing garage because we might want to change
the path once we see how it looks with the garage torn down.

Chris still has to dig a little deeper before he can start laying the bricks because he has to put down road base and sand first. But that's the next step. Pretty exciting! I hope he finishes it soon because I'm excited to use the fire pit!