Extreme Makeover Back Yard Edition

Two summers ago, our back yard looked like this:

My dad and Matt got rid of that nasty tree, I pulled the vines off the fence, and we were left with this:

The other side of our back yard was bearable. It just needed a little extra grass seed to patch things up, but was kind of boring.

Last summer was kind of crazy and I was pregnant, so we didn't work too much on it.

However, this year we did a back yard overhaul of sorts. After a lot of hard work, it now looks like this:

Matt and Mike put in a patio and Erin's mom generously gave us her old patio furniture!

We also have a berm, a garden, cedar flower boxes, and flower planters for the patio. That's right...we're big time. The grass came up pretty quickly with all of the rain we've had, and the plants in our garden are growing like crazy!

These are the cedar flower boxes on the back side of the garage:



In our garden boxes we planted tomatoes, green & yellow peppers, jalapenos, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini, and yellow squash. This is our first garden, so we'll see how it goes! Everything seems to be growing and we have a few little tomatoes on two of the plants, so I'm hopeful.

Matt worked SO hard to accomplish all of this! Talk about sweat equity! Really, I didn't do too much other than make sure Sophie stayed out of the way. I'm so proud of him!! Thanks, honey!

P.S. I officially only have one more week of work and then I will get to be a full-time momma for 2.5 months!! I can hardly contain my excitement. It is going to be SO glorious and Sophie and I plan on spending some quality time in our new back yard!!