History of Our Yard 2010 (Part 1)

A lot happened in 2010!  (Check out 2009 if you missed it)  It was a brutal winter and we learned quickly that sharing a driveway with our neighbor sucked!  Our driveway has two exit, which is great, but they are only wide enough for one car.  So if the pickup is already in the driveway and the Pilot pulls in behind it, the pickup truck needs to pull forward to get out.  Not so easy if your jerk of a neighbor has blocked the other exit. 

No sooner would we (probably hubby) shovel out our entire driveway, then that jerk would park his car right at the exit, so we couldn't use it.  My husband had to trek through the snow to get to his front door to ask him to move his car, just so we could use the exit WE had shoveled!  Sheesh!  I was starting to devise ways to split the road in half.  Giant planter boxes kept coming to mind.

 You can still see the swing set right behind the house.  

 Here you can see the old platform/staircase off the screened porch.

 This next set of pictures were taken in March.  All the while ideas were festering in my head...

Then I started to draw out my ideas.  This was the first of many.  The most important thing was making 3 level areas.  The yard sloped from one side to the other, with zero level spots.  We wanted to change that!

These next photos were taken May 29, 2010.  My brother has tons more, 

but it could be years before he decides to send them to me.

 Two days later the yard was looking like this...

We rented a Bobcat over Memorial Day weekend (so we could get an extra day for free) and I honestly didn't drive it much.  That thing was crazy!  I swear it tore did more harm than good.  Every time you'd go to scoop up some dirt, you wheels would leave these crazy holes everywhere.  It was a mess.  My brother had to come down to help, otherwise hubs and I would've killed each other.  But it was definitely exciting!!

My excitement ended when the zoning inspector came knocking on my door Tuesday morning.  Apparently I needed a permit to level out my yard.  Oops!  Yeah, and not only did I need a permit, but I needed a topographic survey by an engineer which cost me $1000, and $500 in escrow with the town.  Sheesh!  This all took months to straighten out, so the yard sat like this ALL SUMMER LONG!

Crazy that we lived that way, right?  I'll show you tomorrow that 2010 ended pretty well.
 

Visit again soon,
          Smart Girl