We Bought A Jungle : Phase 2 - The . Thome . Home .

We have lived in this house for a little over a year. More than 365 days, and the equivalent amount of complaints rolling off of our tongues about our backyard. You see, we were SO naive when we purchased this home. We were so smitten with the mature trees that covered our backyard. I am fairly certain I called it dreamy, and could not wait to have picnics in the shade of summer. It only took the month of June to get an idea of what life was to be like outside in this backyard …..

It was sheer insanity!

The bugs. The mud from lack of sunshine. The grass hardly grew. Weeds EVERYWHERE. Rocks to trip over every step you took.

Brody + Owen would go out to play and the fun would last 3 minutes until we were questioning if what they were running on was poison ivy. I found that the deck stairs were the safest bet for avoiding spiders, I really did not expect our scenic yard to turn into such a nightmare. We finished off the summer playing in the driveway mostly. The boys would golf and ride their trucks in the back yard, but lack of “clear ” room and safety kept them at bay most of the time.

You can read all about it HERE – and our wild and hysterical process of chopping down the majority of our trees in our back yard HERE. Fast forward to a month ago when we finally took to the plunge to hire someone to “complete” our backyard. As much as we wanted to be true DIY’ ers and do it ourselves, the time committment would have rolled us far into the summer months, leaving us little time to enjoy the finished product. What would have taken us weekends upon weekends to complete was stripped and seeded in two days. You can read more about that HERE

As you can see, our yard came a long way. And what seems to be a complete step backwards in the green zone….

This definitely bummed me out a bit. As excited as I was to see the grass grow, I was a bit nervous at the same time that we would regret taking down so many trees. Like getting plastic surgery and waking up thinking “What the hell did I just do!?”

Thankfully, our landscapers pulled out all the stops and here we are with grass growing, kids and a new fur ball running around it and we could not be happier about the progress it has made!

I laugh out loud at our ridiculously landscaped dead tree. It is like a giant target reminding us we forgot to chop down the biggest tree lacking every drop of life.

We are still rocking our satellite dish in our backyard like a couple of red necks, but until we chop down two more trees in the front yard ($2,300 worth) this yard ornament will work just fine!

The guys so kindly repurposed the mulch from our front yard and put in under our giant pine trees in the back. Landscapers after this girls heart.

If you are wondering what the heck we did with all of that wood we chopped? Oy. We still have SO much more to go shoved in a pile in the corner of our yard, while the rest that Dan and friends got to is stacked nicely in these new firewood holders Dan, his dad and brother-in-law built.