So the yard was a bit (!) overgrown when we moved in last fall:

Note that the front porch is basically obscured and the side of the house has a giant bush taking it over. We plan to pull out the ivy creeping up the side and to hack down the crazy bush at the front of the property.

So, we finally–FINALLY!–had a weekend that wasn’t freezing, snowing or raining endlessly so we set about to hacking out the overgrowth. And I might have been overly enthusiastic to chopping as you’ll see below.

Dale did a lovely job turning our insanely overgrown bushes into bonsai-style trees. And those stones were already there so we just left them–they look cute. We are basically doing this as a test run to see how it grows in. I love that you can see the shape of the porch. We still might end up yanking them out entirely but this is a big improvement for now!

Another big improvement: The side yard. From the back you can see the overgrown walkway on the side of the house:

You can maybe see that the side of the yard has a cement walkway but it was completely overgrown. The bushes made it almost impassable.

So I started trimming. And then this big ol’ bush fell down, hit my ice latte and sent it tumbling to the ground and I got angry at the bushes.

Yeah, so I hacked it down to size. See how it was scraping the heck out of the siding? Ugh!

And then it was gone. Don’t knock over my coffee, tree!

And then I just went crazy:

This is half the pile we created. The other half was in the front yard. 

And there’s the path! I can see it! And I killed everything else. Well, not everything. But we’ll see what regrows and what might be replaced later. Even the overgrown bushes covering the garage window and blocking the stairs are gone.

Maybe we’ll learn to plant things by next summer to make up for it? Eh?