Face Lift

Saturday was a beautiful day, and we decided that it would be a great day to do some yard work. Here's the front of our house before we bought it:

I've never been a fan of big bushes. And I really hated the ones that were in front of our front windows. It kept us from seeing all the weird and interesting people that are always walking in the park in front of our house, and really, shouldn't that be one of the main perks of living by a park - people watching?

So, the bushes were out! Here it is after the little tree and the first bush was out.

Here's what it looked like a little later. What a mess!

So we loaded all the branches in the back of Steve's truck, and he took them off to the branch recycling place. And we had all these leaves in the yard that needed to be raked. Now, usually, we would just mow them up, but for some reason the mower wouldn't start. So, we decided we could rake them ourselves. After all, we do have 4 kids who do things like clean baseboards, so raking a few leaves should be a piece of cake, right?

There was a lot of this

Posing for pictures was fun! And there was a lot of this:

Jumping and rolling around in the leaves was fun! And Joey had the very important job of jumping on the leaves in the trash can:

Yes, Joey is still in his pajamas. And I think he's barefooted too - what of it?

And when it came right down to it, raking the leaves wasn't so bad. It was the bagging of them that got a little old. Okay, more than a little old. I must have said at least 5 times, "Okay, this should be our last bag!" When we were done, we had bagged 13 bags of leaves! Thir-teen! Ugh!

But, then I swept off the porch, and got to put out my new red rockers, and it looked so pretty.

And then Steve climbed on the roof to take down the Christmas lights, and started blowing the leaves out of the gutter. Nice. Oh well, at least somebody enjoyed it.

Next weekend: paint all the shutters black, and the front door red. I love projects like this!