Rollin'...Rollin'...

A few days ago we rented a lawn roller from Home Depot. It's this roller that you fill up with water so it weighs over 200lbs and it compacts the yard down. It was only $14 a day it was well worth it.

See the plant that's climbing up to the top of the deck...we'll address that later on in the post.


It didn't take Michael too long to roll the whole lawn out, but it definitely made a big different.


After rolling the yard Michael built another small wall on the far right side of the yard. That's is going to be my new garden space.

After building the garden space Michael realized how totally annoying the existing retaining wall was. It was old and uneven and just plain driving him nuts so....another project was born. We still have over 60 concrete blocks so he's now in the process of taking the old retaining wall down and he's going to level it off and make it look nice.


When he was removing the old concrete blocks he was finding all sort of creepy crawlers. There were HUGE spiders under there. Click on the picture above and see if you can see the spider...do you see it? I think the spiders were mad that we were destroying their homes because the next morning a really big one was on our dining room ceiling almost directly above Michael's head. GROSS!!!

We are kind of kicking ourselves for not thinking about taking down the old wall earlier. It could have just been tossed into the yard for filler before we got all the dirt. Now we have to do something with it. Taking it to the dump would be one option, but a spendy one...so...

We are the ghetto folks that throw stuff down our back hill. Oh yeah! Michael says we are making a new habitat for really big spiders! Great honey...GREAT!

Here's what the yard looks like now. You'll see the new raised garden section under the stairs and the other stones on the left are part of the stairs to get out of the yard.

Remember the clematis that I was talking about at the beginning of this post....gone! I hated to see it go, but it was necessary. With the stairs being there there was no chance of saving it. We both were so shocked at how open feeling the yard and deck is without it. That whole under the stairs area is going to get overhauled as well. That silly slanted fence under there is coming out too. We're getting closer to seeding the yard though so that's nice!