After a little photo mishap, a partial breakdown and a husband who came to my rescue by recovering my files, I am happy to report on our freshly cleared backyard!

The process started yesterday when a team of people pulled up to our house at 7:30 am and immediately started hacking away at our brush. They were so fast that by the time I left for work at 8:30, a good portion of our mess was flattened. How did they work so fast? They started with chainsaws and machetes. Mike and I were very happy to leave this one to professionals, could you imagine this scene?

We just so happened to pick the most graphic photos ever. But I laughed hysterically at that random head in Mike’s hand. Please substitute tree sap for blood and branches for faux head. Don’t worry, we aren’t really serial killers 🙂

But really, we are very accident prone. There may have been in incident last week involving a laptop and Mike’s face. And there may have been blood. I’m not sure I’m allowed to speak about it, but let’s just say that coding SongMeanings is apparently dangerous…

So after some tree hacking, done by professionals, our backyard is looking wonderful!! First, some before pictures…

This next picture looks like it was taken from under the stairs. I promise I was not sitting under there 🙂

Here are some close-ups of the dead and dying trees that were hanging around back there.

And the much more lively looking after pictures!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the unexpected perks of our backyard is that our house acts as a natural awning for most of the day 🙂

We were enjoying the view and the weather so much that we decided to bring our dinner outside 🙂

We made some homemade pizza with fresh spinach since our organic farm membership started up again this week.

Mike took an after dinner walk to our new-found land and I love this picture for perspective…

Since I know it’s very hard to visualize spaces in pictures, I took before and after videos. I apologize if anyone gets sea sick from my after video. I was walking on the new dirt back there and it’s super soft, so I was stumbling around a bit 🙂

The Before Video:

The After Video:

The videos weren’t taken from the same exact place, since where I’m standing in the after is technically in the old brush, but you get the general idea 🙂

Now we’re looking forward to throwing some grass seed back there, maybe uplighting our freshened up trees and just enjoying our new view!

Today started the backyard clearing process! When our house was built, the land was only cleared to a certain extent. We have a lot of sticky bush type things, dead trees and even an old log hanging out in our backyard. They all clearly had to go so we could enjoy all of our space, since we couldn’t even see our property markers before today. It’s not completely done yet, so I only took a few pictures to share and hopefully I can give you some before and afters when it’s all done tomorrow.

Here is the right side. All the way to the right you can see our neighbors also had their brush cleared and theirs is all done and looking pretty 🙂

A little more center…

Sort of left center…

And left field side.

We still have 3 dead trees that are getting cut down tomorrow, which is good news considering NJ has a tornado watch in effect tonight. I’ve never lived in an area of tornado watches in my 27 years living here. Yeah so, all the more motivation to get rid of trees that may fall on my house in high winds 🙂

Oh! More good news! Our tree buddy is going to dump our pile of wood at the back of the property line so that we don’t have to carry each of those pieces back there! Yay!

The backyard looks 10 times better already. I’m already thinking of whether I could defy the odds and grow grass in the summer. Hm worth a shot in the shady area between those trees? Then maybe I can do this, which I found on Pinterest…

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Or maybe build a kick ass treehouse, also found on Pinterest?

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Time will tell what we do with our new found land!

ps- two days later and both hydrangeas in the front yard are blooming!

I got lucky and had a snow day on Thursday, so I took my time off to do something I’ve been meaning to do around here… I created a Flickr account. You can access it from that funky little blue icon up there on the right, next to that blue Facebook icon and that blue Twitter icon. Seriously, what is up with the social networking sites and the blue! Mike also made a little navigation bar up top to add a few more features and clean up the design of the site. I have a couple of extra changes I want to make to make sure this site is easy for you guys to use and find things.

In my new Flickr account I’ve added all of the pictures of the house while it was under construction. You can find them (in chronological order, for the most part) under the House Under Construction set. These pictures were kind of the jumping off point for this blog, since they are the pictures I used to post under my personal Facebook account as our house was being built. Once the house was done, I stopped taking pictures and people were like whaaaat? More pictures please! And that’s how it all began…

Included are some areas of the house you’ve never seen, such as our master bathroom…

The hallway bathroom….

One of the spare bedrooms…

And the backyard…

The reason why I haven’t showed you any of these spaces is that they haven’t been touched since we moved in. Wait no, the hall bathroom has a shower curtain now and the master has some paper blinds over the tub, but other than that, we’ve done nothing in those areas. Slow and steady wins the race 🙂

Flickr is smart enough to know what camera I took each picture with and when it was taken (for the most part, some pictures are marked as the date they were uploaded), so please excuse the poor quality of the iPhone pics. I want to eventually get a room by room tour up and maybe even make Flickr sets of rooms from start to finish. I haven’t decided how to execute it yet, but it’s in the works!

Looking at these pictures make me happy, it was such an exciting, nerve-wracking and fun time. I still look at them and think, holy crap, we did it.