house project: new fence!

i guess you're officially a "grown up" when getting a new fence makes you excited. although it took us a long time to get excited to this adjustment, i am finally getting used to our new backyard setting. technically getting a new fence wasn't in our plans (at least no where in the near future) for our home and we miss our original yard sometimes, but we've made the best of the yard considering the circumstances.

this is what our backyard looked like a few months ago. very overgrown but very private:


that is our chain link fence that has been buried gradually over the years and then reinforced with chicken wire to keep things in (i.e., our dog townes) or things out (raccoons and neighbors - just kidding!):


a couple months ago, our neighbor was planning on moving and decided to tear down the trees and bushes (since technically they were really weeds). once his trees and bushes were down, our yard immediately looked bad. shabby and no privacy - see what i mean?


here's the other side of our yard with overgrown thorny bushes that were hard to maintain. we decided that we might as well have the trees and bushes on both sides torn down so that we could plant nice trees and bushes to improve our privacy and landscaping.


the chain link looks pretty bad, huh? we knew we needed to put up a wooden privacy fence and that bushes alone wouldn't cut it. we had a bunch of fencing companies come out and give us quotes. we ended up deciding to go with the basic dog-eared privacy fence and it was time to rip out the old chain link. we decided to tear it out ourselves to save some money.


tearing out the chain link was no easy task. there were areas where the fence was buried over a foot underground and covered with ivy. cutting through chain link will give you lots of blisters too!


the remaining chain link fencing below actually belongs to our neighbor so that part was left, but the rest was connected to our home and belonged to us so we removed everything except the posts since we wouldn't be charged and didn't want to dig up cement.


this is all of the stuff we found buried (or thrown) by the fence as we dug it up. 2 huge pipes and tons of bricks. apparently taking things to the curb was too difficult for the old residents.


our other neighbor decided he wanted us to leave the chain link fence up on his side and since it wasn't our fence, we left it; however, when they came to install the fence, we were informed that by putting the fence with the wood panels facing outward (posts on the inside) we would lose over 2 feet of space on the side of the yard. we made a last minute decision to put the posts facing outwards and although it's not typically the standard, we noticed that most of the people in our neighborhood had done the same. this caused some conflict with our other neighbor, so we ended up adding wood panels on both side of the fence on his side and i think all is well now. for anyone putting up a new fence, make sure you have a lot of open communication with your neighbors and that everyone understands how it will work before the crew is there installing it!

anyways, so here was our fence after it was installed! we really loved it, but it looked so bare and boring so we knew we wanted to landscape with some trees and bushes immediately.




we went to pike's nursery and bought 4 trees (2 purple plums, 1 cherry tree, and 1 japanese maple) and some flowering ivy. we bought a bunch of camelia bushes with various flower colors and styles too. we also bought 25 bags of mulch and 60 bags of top soil! we had a hell of a time getting them home but that's a whole other story. we laid them out where we wanted them and then it was time to plant!




we also had weed barrier laid down on the top soil to prevent tons of weeds growing in the future.


voila! here is our backyard landscaping currently. we still have to buy more mulch and lay down the bed liners and we want to plant some flowers soon to add more color. we also planted some lantanas around the base of our birdhouse which will be so beautiful next year. we even laid down some more grass seed to fill in spots of our grass that died over the summer (don't plant fescue in the south by the way - we'll be replacing it this spring).


i will continue to post more pictures as the yard evolves, but i hope you like what we've done so far.

have you had any huge projects come up that you weren't planning on? did you end up loving the results?