Once We Had a Yard...

and now it's gone!

We're undergoing the house project of our lives right now. In preparing to finish our basement and turn it into a playroom, John discovered small cracks in the cinder block walls. While we were assured by many that it wasn't a huge deal, we've come to realize over many months that our foundation was never waterproofed, and thus the moisture from the yard outside has been pushing our walls inward and compromising the foundation of the entire house. Ugh.

I'm thankful for honest and helpful contractors who have helped us diagnose, and now fix, the situation. This week we are paying an exorbitant amount of money (equal to more than 50% of my early post-college paychecks) to a landscaping company who is pulling up all of our bushes, digging 7-foot trenches around our house, taking a closer look at newly-discovered cracks in the walls, waterproofing the foundation and walls, and demolishing our backyard in order to regrade it. This is no small feat. There are typically a half-dozen guys here working their butts off, and we've also seen some heavy machinery.

Boy I wish our little boy was able to see this -- he'd go crazy checking out the trucks! One of Katie's little boy neighbors has been watching intently from the sidewalk across the street.

Here are some photos of the demolition. I sure hope we have enough money leftover to actually do the playroom! And we're definitely interested in any of your recommendations for small, shade-friendly, low-maintenance plants that deer won't eat. We'll have to replant our entire yard.

Backyard:

In this first photo, you can see the top of a man's head in the trench near the corner of the house. The second shows all that's remaining of our backyard -- just the swingset and the shed! -- and you can also see the pieces of the window wells, which they had to pull out. The third photo is of a forklift, which was carrying huge cement slabs out of our yard. To be honest, I really have no idea where those slabs even were to begin with.




Front Yard:

This first photo is from our front door, showing the pile of just some of the trees and bushes that they've had to pull up. The second photo is another similar pile, and also shows the tree stump from a tree that John and our neighbor Sean pulled down this weekend by themselves (ack!). The contractor offered to pull up and haul away anything in our yard that John was able to cut down, so John took the opportunity to get rid of an ugly tree that was interfering with some power lines.

First photo: A row of bushes used to frame the path leading to the backyard. Second photo is a huge piece of equipment (is it called a backhoe?) that they had to specially bring in today when they realized that our wall cracks went below the level they could dig out with their smaller machines.

Here's the trench in the front yard, as well as a larger view showing a very bare front yard.

As a point of comparison, here's what our house looked like six years ago when we bought it. Not that the landscaping ever looked that nice again after we assumed responsibility for it. :-)