AT LAST!!!

After over two years of working in the yard every second of every day (except for the hours and hours that Paul was studying), we are finally done! We just finished building our deck and steps out of the house after not having any for over a year. YEA!! I honestly never thought we would finish. We have been teased a lot by friends and family wondering if we have a life besides working in our yard. Well, we haven't really, but to tell the truth, it has been so much fun working together. Peyton thinks that is what families do for fun - work in the backyard.

Thanks so much to everyone who helped. We couldn't have done it without you.

And now for the unveiling...drum roll please...I just wish I had taken better pictures to document "the before". Like I've said, photography has never been one of my talents. I have no pictures of what our yard was like before we began, and only a few documenting our progress. Let's just say, a quarter of our already TINY yard was completely unusable.

BEFORE

Sorry about the behind shot, Mom. It just shows what a hard worker you are!!

My wonderful brothers - hard at work. (Just a side note...each of those blocks weigh about 90 pounds. I couldn't even lift them - I know, surprising, considering how ripped I am. We had 6 full pallets of them delivered on our front driveway. Paul spent many nights carrying them one by one around the house. One day, our neighbors, two women in their 40s, showed up with aprons and gloves on. "Where do we put the blocks?" Those amazing women carried back 1 and 1/2 pallets all by themselves. People are SO awesome.)

The walls eventually got done, but then there were truckloads and truckloads of dirt to get rid of. Luckily, one of our neighbors needed dirt, so we were able to load it in the truck and just drive it around the corner to unload it. I can't even guess on how many wheelbarrows of dirt we shoveled. (Peyton really was an amazing little helper. There was one time he filled a whole wheelbarrow by himself. He was just barely 2 years old.)

This was taken the night before we had our concrete poured.

And now finally, two years after we started our "little" project. We got the deck done and we are finished!! ...well, maybe...I'm getting some new ideas of what I want to do next.

PS - Sorry for the major over abundance of pictures. I'm just real happy and quite shocked that we actually are finished.