What can I say? We've been busy! (Part I)

Yes, I know I haven't posted in AGES. We've been busy as usual, and then I sort of got out of the blogging habit, and then I just wasn't into it. So my apologies for the hiatus, but I'm back, more or less.

My lack of blogging all started out with being crazy busy Thanksgiving week. In one week, we built a backyard, complete with fencing, and arbor, a brick step, and a place for our hot tub. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here we go...

Where we started. Not much to recommend it as an outdoor living space, but plenty of potential.

We had to remove all of the vegetation (i.e. weeds) to get down to actual dirt, so we rented a tiller-like object that took the hubby for a ride.

After each run with the tiller, I'd rake the bits up, toss them in the wheelbarrow, and remove them.

Yup, looks like a field of dirt. Not much of an improvement, eh?

Elias spent much of the week supervising from a safe distance.

We wanted to build a brick step off the french doors that we'd installed, but first we had to pour a cement pad to lay the brick on. Here we've build the form and put rebar into the existing slab so we could tie things together properly.

Hubby unloads the concrete mixer.

Here's what the slab looked like after we'd poured it and smoothed it out.

We decided that this mostly dead black walnut needed to come down, since it would be very close to our new fenceline. (Yes, we are planting additional trees to take its place.)

We didn't have a real chainsaw, so the hubby got out his toy battery-powered chain saw. It mostly worked.

But in the end, we got out the biggest power tool we have (the truck), and pulled the tree down. Woohoo! Things you can do with your truck!

Next, we spray-painted lines where the planting beds would go so we'd have guides.

The hubby wrestled with the auger that we rented to drill fence post holes as well as holes for the arbor posts.

We only managed to hit one water line while digging the post holes. This one wasn't even in a place where there should have been a water line... in fact, we still don't know where it goes to or what it was supposed to supply.

However, we capped the one end and turned the other end into a spigot. Problem solved.

After fixing the water line, we poured and set the fenceposts.

And I'll have to save the rest of this tale for later, since this is a rather picture-heavy entry. More next time, and you'll get to see the finished product!