God Made Dirt, So Dirt Don't Hurt...

...until the next day. And it's not the dirt that hurts, it's your muscles from moving a pile of dirt. Let me explain.

When we dug into the hill of our backyard to create our fire pit, we had to move the dirt somewhere. Unfortunately, our wheelbarrow had just popped a tired and finding a replacement ended up being harder than expected. Because we found an opening in the weather, though, we trudged on and decided (perhaps misguided) to just move the dirt into the flowerbed against the house that we wanted to completely reno anyway.

Obviously a couple of months ago.

Well, the time has come. That time was Memorial Day weekend. The place was our backyard. It was decided on a whim that we had had enough of our unflattering dirt pile and that it finally needed to be leveled and moved...to the other dirt pile...near our back fence.

So we started digging.

We made pretty good headway the first day, especially considering the fact that we started here.

And ended up stopping here.

It's amazing how moving a little dirt can really make such a huge difference. It's hard to believe it, but the entire brown area that you see here (anywhere with no grass) was the original size of the flowerbed. It was waaaay too deep and, much like the 11 other flowerbeds that used to be scattered about, took up more yard than necessary.

We are hoping to start a vegetable garden near the back fence either late this year or early next summer, so the dirt that we moved will be used soon enough. Because we are going to be tilling it eventually, though, we decided to start pulling out as many rocks as we could while shoveling. The pile started pretty small.

Yes, we were tossing the rocks into the pile. Yes, she refused to move. No, she never got hit. Ninja Puppy.

I would tell you the final count on the amount of rocks we ended up with when we had finished, but apparently counting isn't Sam's strong point. A visual will have to do.

That was at the end of the next day when our friend John came over to help. We managed to finish flattening the entire area and were left with the cleanest of clean slates...well...except for the tree, but he's staying.

To finish it off, we are going to cut the flowerbed in half so it's not so deep, allowing us to use grass seed on the half towards the yard and put in some partial-shade-lovin' plants in the bed itself. We started small and haven't done much else due to sore muscles. At least the hostas that Alex and Abby gave us seem to be doing well!

Of course, we are still hoping to finish the hammock stands, too. Right now, the yard is so lush, it's making them look bad.

But with the POWER OF PHOTOSHOP, I can show you what we are looking at for a finished product.

At the moment, we are just happy with a more inviting yard, some green grass, and a place for the pups to play. Hopefully, though, we will have a nice new flowerbed that matches the other side near the porch soon.

And looking over all of this is my birthday gift from Scott. He's a bird house!

We hope everyone had a happy Memorial Day (but also remembered the importance of those who fight for our freedom). May 25 was also my Grandma's birthday! Happy Birthday, Grandma!

We have been moving around some furniture in the house. I'll show you next week!