Fire Pits and Flower Beds – A clean slate

When I first moved in to this house it was the middle of winter so I didn’t get much of a feel for the yard until several months later.  Let’s just say there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost on the yard for me!  Clearly curb appeal and flowers were not top priority up to this point.  At least the entire back yard was fenced with tall, white, vinyl fencing so there was an awesome area for the kids to play where I didn’t have to worry about them on the street.

In order to make things better, you sometimes have to start by almost making it worse, am I right?

I pulled out the wild rose bushes that had taken over the back of the house, even covering some of the windows and patio doors, pulled out all sorts of dead plants and trees around the property front and back.  Basically started from scratch!

Do you love it yet?  🙂 Yes, the house was green back then!  I love the white fenced yard though, if you can’t be out in the country!

Lots of sore muscles and a huge pile of brush and dead plants later……we were ready to start fresh!

One thing we decided to do, which is still a work in progress, was to make the area by the sliding glass doors into a patio/entertaining area.  We chose to take out all the sprinklers in that area (BIG job) and will be putting in patio stone instead of the grass.  We still haven’t gotten to that point yet, as you will see from the pictures.  In this area we decided to put in a fire pit so we could enjoy cool evenings outside with the kiddos, campfires, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows etc.

I started by shaping the fire pit where I wanted it using some leftover concrete blocks we took out of the front beside the driveway.  We marked the space to dig and then the MR started digging.  (I had to take pictures, you know 😉 )  After we had the hole as deep as we wanted it, we put the blocks back in place around the edge.  I can’t tell you how often we have used this fire pit already!  The kids LOVE having fires out here and so do we.

Hey at least you can get in the patio doors and see the windows without being attacked by thorns!