Yard History 2010 (Part 1)

A lot happened in 2010!  (Check out 2009 here.)  It was a brutal winter and we learned quickly that sharing a driveway with our neighbor sucked!  Our driveway was L shaped, with two exits, which is great, but not if your jerk neighbor blocks one exit with his car.  Our driveway was only wide enough for one car, so whichever car pulled in first would get stuck.  Now obviously this is a 21st century problem and one that many people have with their own driveway.  BUT my driveway was designed to be used on both sides and it pissed me off that my idiot neighbor parked his car to block one exit.  No sooner would hubby shovel out our entire driveway, then that jerk would park his car right at the exit, so we couldn’t use it.  My husband had to trek through the snow to get to his front door to ask him to move his car, just so we could use the exit WE had shoveled!  Sheesh!  I was starting to devise ways to split the road in half.  Giant planter boxes kept coming to mind. I still think it’s funny that our swing set was right up against the back of the house.  There just wasn’t any other place to put it at the time.This next set of pictures were taken in March.  All the while ideas were brewing in my head.  I was watching Yard Crashers religiously and I borrowed every landscaping, hard scaping, gardening book my library had.  I also made good {mental} notes about what worked and what didn’t work about the yard.  The left side of the house, which included the perimeter of the garage, was steeply sloped and it was very difficult to walk along there.

In this picture, you can see one of our downspouts aimed right at our {nice} neighbor’s property.

These pictures are crazy to me because the yard looks nothing like this now.  The deck is still there, but everything around it has changed.  Soon there will be retaining walls, stairs, gravel, new deck railings, etc.

These next photos were taken in May 2010, days before we tore up the whole yard.  My brother has tons more pictures,but it could be years before he decides to send them to me.

We rented a Bobcat over Memorial Day weekend (so we could get an extra day for free) and I honestly didn’t drive it much.  That thing was crazy!  I swear it did more harm than good.  Every time you went to scoop up dirt, the tires would leave these gigantic holes and you couldn’t even tell where you just scooped up dirt.  It was a mess.  My brother had to come down to help, otherwise hubs and I would’ve killed each other.  My brother had never driven a Bobcat either, but he was more a voice of reason.  But it was definitely exciting!!

My excitement ended when the zoning inspector came knocking on my door Tuesday morning.  Apparently I needed a permit to level out my yard.  Oops!  Yeah, and not only did I need a permit, but I needed a topographic survey by an engineer which cost me $1000, and $500 in escrow with the town.  Sheesh!  This all took months to straighten out, so the yard sat like this ALL SUMMER LONG!  I wasn’t even allowed to dig with a shovel.  Nothing.  The kids got so dirty that summer, digging in the dirt.

We used the Bobcat to help us (hubby, brother and myself) move the swing set down a level without having to take too much of it apart.

Crazy that we lived that way, right?  I’ll show you tomorrow that 2010 ended pretty well (Part 2 HERE).  Sometime that summer I took a can of spray paint and painted a line down the center of the asphalt road and wrote PRIVATE PROPERTY on my side of the line, facing the neighbor.   For the complete yard history click here.