Fall Projects

This fall we did a few projects to our yard. We have wanted to do a patio for a while but didn't really have anywhere we wanted to put it. Well, this summer/fall, I just decided that I was sick of waiting so I called and got a few bids on things and got the ball rolling. We ended up moving the fence on the east side of our house up about 12 feet since our front yard was huge, and we wanted to be able to use the shade from the house during those hot afternoons/evenings. Here is a picture of them drilling some new holes for the new fence posts

After they got the new posts put in, we had our patio poured, and we love it. I decided to go red to match our house, and it feels so much more fun than just a regular old gray cement color. I don't feel like I am sitting on someone's driveway. :-) In the picture below you can also kind of see our garden. It was really fun to watch them pour the cement, and how fast those guys had to work to get it all smoothed out before it dried - it was a HOT day when they poured it, even though it was in September.

Here is a picture of the finished product, looking back at the house. I am guessing I took this around 3:00-4:00pm so you can see we already have a fair amount of shade by that point. I want to get some fun lighting for the deck, but for now we just have a bunch of tiki torches set up around it, which gives it a nice soft light. Actually, the torches are in the shed at the moment since there's a bunch of snow out there, but once the spring weather emerges, so will the torches. :-)

The lighting in the picture below is kind of weird, but this is Matt's shed that he built, or maybe I should just say put together. We ordered it off of Amazon (yes, we get everything from Amazon) and it's actually a pretty sturdy shed, and not too ugly since it's right off our patio. I did plant a Rose of Sharon tree in front of it on the left, and plan on planting a few other things around it too.

We are really looking forward to a LOT of dinners out on the patio come summertime. I grew up eating dinner out on our deck a lot and I hope my kids can have some of those same fun memories.