progress

we've made progress this week on our backyard! for those of you that don't know, we have a decent size backyard, however right now it's not exactly user-friendly. you see we have this gigantic hill just beyond our deck, fondly called "the green monster". up the hill, we have another 70 x 35 feet of woods. the plan is to cut out the hill to gain an additional 70 x 15 feet area and put in a retaining wall with stairs leading to the woods. this is quite the project both money-wise and time-wise. i'm proud to say that step number 1 was completed this week~yay!!! we had to have several very tall trees removed that were either dead or hazardous. these needed to be cut down before we dig out the hill since they were growing where we plan to dig. we weren't too excited about spending so much money to have the trees removed, BUT it turns out that we got to keep the mulch from our trees which ended up being an entire truckload of mulch worht about $600! so now we're working on clearing out the woods and putting the mulch down. it's making the area so much more usable and parker loves exploring the woods! i'm excited because i feel so much more comfortable with him playing in the area since i can see if there are any critters or snakes, etc. one step down, and many more to go. next step~the big dig!