Our Weekend as a Wannabe DIY Cable Show

You know you've watched one.  Some family/couple/person gets their room/house/yard redone in some totally unbelievable amount of time without breaking a sweat.  Cameras pan over dreadful spaces and then half a hour later the great reveal shows whooooooooosh, gasp, AMAZING!

OK.  So we didn't have an entire cable TV show crew to help us.  And there was no cheerful host cracking little jokes along the way.  But we did have an overly helpful preschooler who didn't understand why he wasn't allowed to run the heavy machinery.

Fade in:
Moores Redo the Entire Front Lawn.

Old Lawn.  Dead, dying, fungus and mite ridden. (I didn't take a very good before shot)

 Laying out new shrubs and perennials in future bed location.  More dead, fungus ridden grass.

Travis rented a sod cutter to cut out the lawn.  He also cut out about 1/3 of the backyard where the bunnies ate it.

Yucky lawn OUT!  Compost going IN.  You can see all the rolls of sod stacked up in the garage.

 Here's the flash forward part.  We got so busy I didn't take any more pictures until we were pretty much all done.  The project took all of Saturday (T got up at 6, F and I at 6:30) and half of Mother's Day.  By Sunday night I literally collapsed.  Monday evening I finished up the rock and tried unsuccessfully to tweak the sprinklers, it was just too windy here to do a good job.

We now have a perennial bed and shrubs where the worst grass was.

Our neighbors are all pretty happy to not have to look at our eyesore front yard anymore, but were quick to reassure us it had been that way for many, many years.  Travis and I were feeling a bit like lawn care failures but I guess last summer the moisture from the winter before made us look good.  Here's hoping the shrinking patch of grass does better this summer!