Ok… let’s talk about our backyard. If you are new here, my husband and I did our ENTIRE backyard by ourselves about 6 months ago. Yes, you read that right… by ourselves! *pat on the back*
First off, it’s so crazy to think that this beautiful yard was done with 4 hands… sometime 6 with our very good friend that helped whenever we needed a additional helping hands, but otherwise this was 98% done by us. You can read all about how we did our backyard, along with tips here.
So fast forward to 6 months later…. things have now settled a bit and survived it’s first summer. Which led into some things that we either didn’t like or some things that have just gone wrong.
I wouldn’t say it’s nothing drastic, but things that definitely need to be worked on.
First, is our outdoor dining area. Out of all the backyard process this area was the part I hated! These pavers were such a pain in the ass!
But I love this area. It has held many dinners so far, but because of that, we have experienced some loose bricks. So it’s nothing bad… all we simply have to do is glue the bricks down with more of a sturdier adhesive and then add more sand in between all the bricks, brush it out in between the cracks, and spray it down so it can harden.
Another part of the backyard that we have been experiencing is all the sand coming up from our turf. So, what we found out is that, the sand that we purchased (industrial sand) makes it very dusty, as some of the sand from the bottom comes flying up whenever you run or even lay down on it. I wish we would have known this, otherwise, we would have purchased better sand.
However, I have noticed though, that since the girls have been playing with water in the back, there isn’t much of the sand coming up. So I’m not sure if it’s settling now, but if it’s going to continue to happen, then we definitely will purchase a higher grade sand, so we don’t have to deal with it in the future. Luckily, when it came to applying all the sand in the turf, we didn’t, so we still have about 6-8 bags of the sand that was suppose to go into the turf. And, the reason why we didn’t apply all of the bags in the turf was because of this reason.
When we first started filling the turf with sand, we started notice all the dust that was coming up from it. So we just filled the yard with a light layer throughout and wanted to “test” it first. Sure enough, dust was still coming up from the sand.
Another disappointing issue that we had, was our black polished rocks. Not even a week into laying them down, they all started to fade because of the Vegas heat. Unfortunately, once we laid down the rocks we threw all of the bags away, so we couldn’t return them, which honestly was really disappointing because we spent hundreds of dollars on those rocks.
So, the next best solutions was spray painting them with a high heat tolerance. That worked… for a certain amount of time. And, now it’s fading again. The above picture is the brand of polished rocks that we bought from The Home Depot and I do not recommend.
Moving on to our fire pit area. There isn’t necessarily wrong with this area, but I do wish that I would of used a 2×4 boarder along the fire pit, instead of the garden boarder.
As you can see, the boarder is so small, and when the kids play in this area, the small river rocks are kicked out of the fire pit and making it’s way in the turf. Which becomes a pain in the ass cleaning up the rocks.
Lastly, lets talk about my plants in the backyard. So under each light I wanted to have some type of plants underneath, and purchased Japanese box woods from the nursery and did just that. My thought process was that I will just water them every morning or so, until it’s Fall when we can install drip lines in the back (it was wayyy to hot to do it in the summer). Well, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but all of my boxwoods died. Sad moment for me, and unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of them died and how awe full it looked, but I didn’t remove them all because I couldn’t stand the sight of them.
And, not to mention I had a few other plants in the back, which have all died as well. Luckily, I have managed to keep my lemon tree and elephant bush tree alive (which I am surprised at)!
So what now?
First and foremost, what we plan on doing within the next month or two is fixing the bricks in our dining area that are lose and adding more sturdier sand in between.
As far as the other issues, as much as we wanted to fix the rocks, install drip lines in the back, and add a higher grade sand to the turf; we’ve decided to postpone all of that because… we plan on building a pool in our backyard!
Building a pool has been a dream of mine and growing up in my parents house with a pool, has been something I’ve enjoyed a lot when I was younger. We are hoping we can have that done within the next 2 years. So, we decided that putting more money into the back isn’t going to be worth it; especially since we plan on having a pool back there.
The only other thing that I’m going to change is going to be the boarder in our fire pit. This is something that’s going to be really in-expensive, so I think it’ll be worth it, and worth my sanity!
In addition to adding a pool back here, we also plan on pushing out of wall on both sides of the home (based on HOA approving it). This way it’ll give a little more room.
And lastly, we will have a beautiful outdoor kitchen here, which I am thrilled about. We love grilling/cooking outdoors, so I think this will be a great addition to the back!
I’m really excited for the plans of our backyard, I just really hope it’ll all come together (granite this all gets approved through HOA), but if it does… it’ll be very exciting!
XOXO
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