Matt and I have been rocking our Friday nights of late. A few weeks ago, we spent our entire Friday evening organizing the garage and sweeping it out from corner to corner. It was pretty amazing.
What? You don’t think that sounds “amazing?” We had our tunes and we had our beers and we had each other, so we were good.
The following Friday evening, we got Harrison to sleep and set our sights on the side of the garage that is not visible from the street.
It’s a bit of a nightmare over there. You see, we use the space to store ladders, spare pieces of lattice, sand bags and any other remnants of outdoor crap that Matt doesn’t want to store in the garage/mancave. We decided to attack two eyesores on the side of the garage. Two giant, evergreen eyesores that were small when we bought the house five years ago and had grown to epic proportions.
You can see them peeking out behind the rocker in this shot…
…and they’re in this shot with a dusting of snow…
They grew so tall and were so completely neglected that they started to shroud the mancave. They blocked so much of the sun that the window sill on that side is rotted out completely. As well as the bottom of the door. Good times. Good projects.
So, armed with tools ranging from a lopper to a saw to a wheelbarrow to carry all of the stuff to the back woods, we got to work. Yeah, you can skip quickly over the picture of my husband’s butt. #sorryimnotsorry
It took about 150 cuts on Matt’s part and a couple dozen trips across the backyard dragging the heavy branches on my part.
I only stopped once to take a picture of this adorable bird’s nest nestled among the evergreen needles.
I may or may not have been cracking jokes about Matt calling me Bessie because I was basically his workhorse. A couple hours later just as it started getting really, really dark, we called it quits.
Here are the fairly lackluster before and after shots - they’ll be way more dramatic when this space is 100% done, of course.
So now, all we have to do is actually rip the bushes out of the ground. My brother-in-law came over to help Matt the following Saturday, but those bushes haven’t budged. I posted a funny video of them going to town on my Instagram feed. (@SchoolHouseRehab) We’re brainstorming how we can get them out (A truck with a rope? Renting a stump grinder? Digging extra deep with sheer manpower?). I’ll keep you posted and for now, I’m enjoying the view of a pretty tree I barely noticed before.
The rest of the to-do list for this space looks like this:
- rip out bushes
- plant grass seed this Fall or next Spring
- replace garage window sill
- paint garage window sill
- paint garage side door
- replace garage side door hardware
- add flowers and or containers
- find a new spot for the wheelbarrow and ladder
So that’s where we stand. Hopefully by next April or May, this area will be looking waaaay different than it is now. I mean ideally, I hope it looks better by November 1st, but I’m being realistic.