Surprise... Landscaping!

Well, in my last post I mentioned that I had a landscaping pro coming to work on our yard soon.

I guess I misunderstood when we spoke--I thought he was coming a week from this past Friday. I was wrong. He came this past Friday. It was so cool.

When Avy, Xavier and I arrived at home, we obviously noticed there was a strange truck in the driveway. Everything became clear to me right about then...

And we were happy.

Here's the newly cleaned-out back yard.

I don't know if this picture does the work he did in the yard proper justice.... there were a lot of branches and left-over leaves laying around, making the yard look smaller and messier. He also cut the grass.This is the top of our driveway. I don't have a "before" shot right now, but take my word for it--that area was full of debris. Now it's clean and neat. It's so much nicer.


These are the bushes in front of the house. I was frankly kind of embarrassed at the amount of leaves that were underneath these. Landscaper dude got 'em out of there. Nice.


This is the tree in the front yard. Landscaper dude didn't do anything to the tree, but it's pretty, and I actually was incorrect in identifying it in previous posts. I thought it was a Japanese Maple. It is not. This is a Dogwood. And it's pretty sweet.

This is the front of the house. The grass is nice and neat, but, if you look off to the right, you can see a big pile of leaves right near our neighbor's house. Those were all in our backyard. I wish I had taken a picture of the landscaper's truck--the back was almost overflowing with leaves. He said he'd been there since mid-day. He finally left around 8pm. That's a lot of work for one guy.

So, what have I learned? Well, I really need to pay better attention--I need to listen when someone tells me a specific day they'll be showing up. That way I won't be surprised by stuff like this. I have learned that gas-powered lawn implements beat the crap out of electric implements. Big time. The drawback is that nasty gas smell. And I have learned that sometimes it is pretty satisfying to pay someone to do a job that you want done well. I walked around all weekend saying, "I love this yard."

Odd side note: It seems like every one of our neighbors took a cue from our yard work--for the rest of the weekend, all you could hear were lawn-mowers, weed-whackers and leaf-blowers on our block. I must say, it's pretty nice to live in an area where the folks really take pride in their homes.

So... Minor update.



I called a landscaper to get a price for lawn work.
It breaks down like this:
They're gonna come and clean out all of our old leaves and whatnot, trim the bushes, edge the lawns, straighten out our flower beds and cut the grass. This first appointment will cost us $220, which seems kind of expensive... but that's because there is a lot of work to do.

After this, they'll cut our lawn once a week for $30 per cut. This includes edging, hedge trimming and waste removal.

The ivy removal will have to be a separate project for later in the summer.
Can't wait to come home and see the yard looking all spiffy!

Leaves, Gutters and You.

Yesterday, Avy worked on the house by herself for a while, since I was at work. She tore up some more carpet and whatnot. The place is looking better by the minute, and that funky smell is slowly but surely disappearing--thank god.

Funnily enough, Avy says the smell didn't seem too bad to her until she started working on the floors by herself. She says it hit her kind of suddenly when she pulled up a chunk of carpet in the bedroom.

But never mind that... let's talk about leaves, shall we?

This new neighborhood is full of trees, which is really quite lovely, especially in the fall/winter, with the leaves changing colors and falling, etc. But you know what's not so great about leaves? They fall on your house and wind up in your rain gutters, especially if your house is old-school, like The Serpico House. Long story short, I snuck a peek at the gutters over the weekend, and I was not pleased. The gutters are in fine shape, actually, but they're full of leaves. This is bad.

Leaves are the enemies of gutters--they clog them up and cause water to go places we don't want it to go... like into the house or the foundation of the house. Not good. I was able to sort of quickly push the leaves out of one gutter over the weekend, but most of the roof isn't too accessible without a ladder (and I ain't got one yet), so I had to accept the fact that I will not be able to to clear the gutters completely for a while. It sucks, but I have to think that if the gutters were OK thus far, they will be OK for a while longer.

I'm thinking it would be pretty sweet to upgrade our gutters to these bad boys...

I don't know what these things cost, but I'm gonna guess it's expensive--whenever they don't list the price online, you know it's not cheap. Damned if this doesn't look like a really good idea, though, but I'm going to ignore this option for a while. I can clean gutters until I can afford to add the snazzy, self-cleaning kind.

I really don't like the idea of climbing around on the roof, pawing leaves out of the gutters, but it's obviously not beyond the realm of my abilities. It's obviously not a complex activity, but it's not pleasant. And paying someone to do it? Well, I don't mind paying for a valuable service, but I also don't have money for that kind of stuff.

Of course, there are other options. Like this thing, for example.

Seems pretty straight-forward, right? We just received a lovely leaf-blower as a gift from my folks (they no longer have a yard since they live in a high-rise condo now), so all I need to get would be the additional kit in order to make this happen, and then I could stand on the ground to do this. I like that idea. No ladders. Yes.