Yard Work

In case you don't remember, I posted back in June about our yard.  It was a forest.  Well, Saturday I gathered a work crew: Me, Mom, Dad, Jim, Nancy, Skip (when he woke up), Mary, and Sarah and Andy Z.  Here is a chronical of the work we did:

Preston, waiting for everyone to get to the house.  He likes to go under the table and go "Scchh" and yell really loud.  It's probably because we usually are yelling at "Scchh" when he goes under the table!

Here's Jim and Mom working in the yard.  The white poles were trellis' that were buried 4 feet into the ground, and then into concrete.  This was just the beginning of us realizing how difficult it was going to be to get this stuff up. Jim: "Hey, you guys better get your Chinese food orders ready, because I'm about to hit China!"

Nancy and Jim digging and hauling flagstone.  Mom's playing with fire in the background.

Here's Nancy and Jim assessing more of the damage.  Little did we know that bird-feeder pole was also buried in concrete.  There were just all kinds of weird things used in this yard.  There were random pieces of edging, rocks, wood framing... just all kinds of crap.  It's as if the people were bracing for armageddon or something.  This yard was going nowhere!

I didn't think this tree was going to get to come down that day, but it did!

Here's Preston, just hanging out watching all the fun!  Notice his adorable "candy corn" hat made by Cassandra for the Halloween season.

The tree is down!

The city of Milwaukee will pick up our brush, I just hope it's not over the limit for what they'll take.  This was only the beginning of what we left out there...

This is the ugly root system from the tree.  It took most of the time to get that all dug up.

I got Scotch a bone to keep him occupied.  A couple of times he came up to me with a stick or something in his mouth thinking he had something he wasn't supposed to have.  I thought, "chew on whatever the heck you want, buddy!"

Once we got the big pond tarp up, we realized the edges of the pond had been laid out with railroad ties held together with 4-ft long rhibar.  The rhibar was ALSO in concrete.

Andy had to go get his sledgehammer so we could break up the concrete.  Then Skip just sawed the wood from the tree house down as far as possible, and we just buried over what we couldn't dig up. 

We thought there was concrete UNDER the pond, too... Thank god it was just clay which had been kind of oxidized so it was white.

Here's a view from the back looking front.  You can see along the left side that there are still some nice trees and shrubs that we just cut back, so next spring we should have more controlled growth.  Not to mention a.) we didn't pull EVERYTHING up, and b.) we won't have to plant much.  I can't believe the difference a day made in making the yard look totally different.  We've still got some hauling and brush removal to do, but in the spring we'll be able to plant grass seed and get a real lawn going!