The Yard Progress - south side yard

This is boring for most of you, but I'm so glad to have these pictures to see the progress we've made! I was feeling depressed about the yard progress and finding all these photos made me feel better. ☺

 Spring 2014

We removed this fence thingy that I had installed 10 years prior. ;)  It was looking rough.

One of my regrets is that I didn't put this arbor that my grandpa built in a "safe" spot, because I went to go find it recently to reuse it, and I think it got thrown away.  :( 

(Cary is rolling his eyes at me somewhere right now)

 Still in spring 2014 we took out all the hedge and some other bushes.

 Summer 2014 -I know most of you think I'm crazy that I didn't just stop here...but grass is BORING (and a pain to mow every week). ☺

November 2014 - The big Elm tree had to come out, and the yard got ripped up in the process, and  then John Hansen poured a new sidewalk next to our yard.

A big mess!

Spring 2015 - the rock wall had to be rebuilt and moved. The old rock wall was where the cement pad is. I like the look of the rock wall, but the maintenance is so annoying!  I don't want to fit doing something else in the budget at this point, so rock wall it is.

The rest of the yard looked like crap, but I had some pretty roses. 

 Summer 2015 - I had flags marking where rose bushes were in hopes that Cary wouldn't weed wack them. It didn't always work. ;) 

At some point during the summer, we (Cary) positioned some broken cement pads for my pathway, and then Kiah and Miguel were taking out all these bushes from my grandpa's old yard, so I took them and transplanted them here. 

 Fall 2015

The soil back here is depressing. It's pure clay, and so hard to deal with so I decided, bushes and trees, no flowers back here (for the time being) and weed barriers and mulch! So I've been transplanting all the roses and flowers away from this area over to the side area.

In this corner I transplanted a Forsythia, (also from grandpa's yard) and I transplanted a mock orange that was on the other side of the yard that was to close to the plum tree (and suffering majorly from chlorosis). In the bottom of the picture are some of my rose bushes.

The rose bushes were plagued with issues this summer because we didn't have a winter last year. The aphids and dust mites were really bad, but for some reason I insist on keeping them and buying more! ;) 

Spring 2016 - Obviously, everything is still dormant. I took these pictures after Cary and I transplanted the last two Mugo pines a few weeks ago. 

I've ended up with about 15 rose bushes out here, so we'll see if all of them survived the winter. I've slowly been working on getting everything mulched when the weather allows, but I had a minor operation last week and I'm supposed to be taking it easy so I'm bummed to not be out working!

I ordered a bunch (9?)of trees from Arbor Day Foundation and planted them in December, so we'll see what comes up. 

We transplanted grandpa's Peonies to my yard, and Peonies do not like to transplanted so I was pretty skeptical that they would make it, so I've been so excited to see this! I had also transplanted one that mom had in a different part of this yard, and it was buried too deep so it wasn't flowering and it's coming up too.

Counter tops

Two years ago when we moved cabinets around to make room for the dishwasher and stove, we then ended up with an island. Since then we've just been living with a melamine board as our temporary counter top over the island and it's worked out surprisingly well and still doesn't look too terrible. 

We finally moved ahead on getting new counter tops for the kitchen and kids bathroom. We didn't do our other bathroom because theoretically, we are tearing that bathroom out at some point. 

I spent alot of January looking up counter top places and eventually had 6 quotes done up.

 These are pictures of how everything looked before...

 After we moved cabinets around, we had cabinets sticking past the original countertops, so we put a strip of board over the top.

The seams in the laminate had been exposed to water and were warped

 One of the first things we had to do was install some supports for the new countertop going on the island since we were planning on a 15" overhang.

I really didn't want corbels, so I had researched online and found these steel support beams and Cary installed them. 

I ended up going with a place out of Cedar City to get the counter tops from and we had an install date for last Wednesday, on Monday he wanted to change it to Tuesday, which would have been nice, but Cary was in SLC and I didn't feel comfortable trying to move out old counter tops and undoing plumbing. ☺ 

We stuck with Wednesday.

Cary got back on Tuesday night and then Wednesday morning after getting kids off to school, we started removing old sinks and counter tops.

There was a lot of rot underneath the sink

and then we were surprised to find that a strip of sheetrock was cut out behind the back splash. This was a problem since I had specifically NOT ordered the typical 3-4" backsplash in the kitchen. We are going to eventually do a tile backsplash, but I was planning on just being able to paint down to the counter top. 

Not happening now. ☺

Yay! Hyrum and his helper arrived and started the install.

I think since the counter top in the kitchen was already white, there really wasn't a huge change as far as things look, but both sinks were upgraded to under mount and and now the faucets will be easier to clean around so I'm excited about that part.

My dream counter top would be white quartz and while I think we are too practical to ever pay for quartz, when looking at solid surface samples there was a new white color that had some sparkle, which is one of the things I like about quartz, and I knew right away that it was what I wanted! 

Even if you have in your mind an idea of what you want it's hard to commit to something you're going to have to live with for a long time!

A back splash for the kitchen just got moved to the top of the list.