End of the Saga

Yes, and it was a saga. But, we are pleased to say the vast majority of the backyard work is DONE! To refresh your memory, here is the before:




And, after!





What is that you say? There was supposed to be a shed? A cute, cedar shingled shed complete with window, flower box, storage for the lawnmower and outdoor toys? Oh yes. Let's just say, now we know that in the future WE will be the ones to go to Town Hall and obtain necessary permits, not the landscaping company. Lesson learned on this one. The shed was started and nearing completion when we discovered that we actually cannot have a shed in our yard if it is within 6 feet of our neighbor's property line. We live in a city - this makes it basically impossible. So, bye bye shed. Hello.....empty area in the wall. The plan now is to replace the gravel (that was for the foundation of said shed) with blue stone and get a nicer grill to make it our barbecue area. Next summer. I am done with this for now.







As we can see, there is still some work to be done - we need more grass seed in some places while other areas need some serious weeding and mowing. Our new plants need to grow a bit (the trees - a Japanese Maple and a Juniper Nano will eventually get to be 6-8 feet tall). We also have the side yard:



We aren't planning on doing much - we want to leave a lot of grass for Henry - but next summer we may do some new plants and basically clean it up a bit.


We also had some work done on the front of the house. I don't have "before" picture, it was too horrifying. Basically picture large areas of mulch and weeds. Really not attractive.

The large area to the left of our driveway (once all mulch) was a dilemma. We didn't know what to do with it. The problem was two-fold: first, there is no water source (hose hook-up) in the front of the house, so anything requiring sod, plants, etc. would be a pain to maintain. Secondly, the Town of Brookline is a major, major pain about parking. If you aren't familiar with Brookline's insanity over parking, basically they don't care if you are a resident or not - no one is allowed to park on the street for more than 2 hours and there is absolutely no parking on the street between 2 AM and 4 AM (so, no overnight parking). You can imagine that this creates quite the quandary for residents. Off-street parking is a hot commodity. People usually rent spaces for $250-$300 a month, and having extra off street parking can easily add $20K - $50K to your house value.

To make a long story short, the area by our driveway is not permitted for parking (which we knew), and the Town was adamant that whatever we did to that space it had to be impossible for anyone to ever park there. So, we ended up doing this:




They put down pavers and a tree. It is a Dogwood tree, so once it gets bigger we should have some nice spring flowers. Whatever we did we had to have a tree in the middle or some type of 6 inch or higher wall around the whole area. We get it Brookline, we can't park there.

We also had sod added to the strips by the street. I wish I had before pictures, because it is a big improvement.



And now, back to Henry updates....