What a mess

Last night Nate and I finally set out to start cleaning up the backyard. It's a mess after a big storm last summer, the crazy wind storm of October and then a winter full of very heavy snow.

I swear I have never seen so many branches down in our yard. And those of you who have seen our backyard know that it is huge.

We've been putting off working out there for awhile, but knew that we had to start getting after this sooner rather than later or it was going to get worse and we'd have the city after us for not mowing our lawn - which we've done once due to all the branches and even then it wasn't great because Nate had to mow around all the branches. So last night was the night.

We worked for an hour and a half before getting utterly exhausted and having to stop. I don't know how I was delusional enough to believe we'd get it all done in one night. The good news is we've consolidated to one last pile, so once that is done, that should be the worst of the small stuff anyway.

There are bigger tree branches that Nate will need to use a chainsaw on or we may even have to have hauled away professionally, but thankfully the majority of that stuff is at the way back of our lot.

We loaded up three yard bags worth of the smaller piddly branches that we cut up by hand. Fun stuff.

Seriously though, I am declaring this the summer that we finally get the backyard in shape. We have a good sized yard and a nice deck and we don't take enough advantage of it, namely because we never get our act together enough to do the work to make the yard really nice. Or other projects get in the way. Well, this year, no major projects are scheduled. So it's on. We're going to try and make a planting area around the deck and make it look nice.

And there will need to be bonfires because some of the bigger branches are going to make great firewood. Stay tuned.