More Home Updates/My Rant!

Do you ever feel like you take one step forward then two steps backwards? 'Cuz that's how hubs and me are feeling right now. Don't get me wrong, we're definitely making progress here but we've taken on so many more projects around the house than we've anticipated...and I'm not even sure how that happened! Let me give you an example, when Matthew and I moved in we knew we wanted to put a fence in our yard for the dogs. So we got out our handy little "to do" list and added fence to the budget list, not to be confused with bucket list. Although, I guess there are some similarities, the budget list is definitely a list of things we'd like to accomplish eventually with this home. Seems so simple, right? Well, you've obviously guessed it wasn't because why else would I be leading you into the story like this? We quickly found out that our property line contained lots and lots of overgrown shrubs that would have to be removed if we were going to put up a fence. Matthew and I discussed our options and we decided to have the shrubs removed professionally since it was such an enormous undertaking. Alright, so pay company to remove shrubs: check. Pay another company to install fence: check. We went a tad over budget there, no big deal,  oh but wait, now we don't have any grass on the side yard since the massive shrubs we're impeding any grass to grow for like oh, I don't know, ten years. Now we have a fenced yard with very little grass. No grass=mud. Mud+dogs=disaster. We're currently trying to grow grass using seed but if you've ever heard the expression "it's like watching grass grow" you'll understand that this is an extremely slooooow process. Ideally, we'd love to put down sod but that is definitely not on the budget list anytime soon! Despite my rant just now, Matthew and I are so happy that we're homeowners, it's such an awesome accomplishment and we're feeling really proud of ourselves while learning lots of lessons as we go along. I think the biggest lesson we've learned so far is how easy it is to underestimate just how much time and money a project will take. It seems like each project we've taken on requires three or four unplanned little projects before we can even begin what we originally had on our list. When everything is said and done though, I can't tell you how much satisfaction we have from owning a home. We'll continue to take on each project little by little until our house is complete...or when we're ready to sell and start the chaos all over! Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, I was feeling really good with our progress until we had another little setback while the hardwood floors were being installed...I will share more about the dilemma we ran into with the floors tomorrow but for now I'll leave you with pictures of our new fence and grass-less yard!

This side of our yard has a ton of grass, let's hope the dogs spend their time here!

This part of the yard only has one spot without grass!

The next few pictures are the areas I'm most worried about. It may not look that bad in pictures but it gets really, really muddy. Just from the little rain we had this weekend made our yard very muddy, combine that with two dogs and especially one who loves to dig and you've got a recipe for disaster!