Our House, Part 3: The Back Yard

 One year ago today, we moved into our new house. Well, new to us: it was over 10 years old at the time. Some may wonder whether that was a wise time to buy, with prices being near an all-time high. In the year since we moved, our old home has fallen in value as much as, if not more than, the new home so all we really did was move our mortgage from one abode to another. The portion of the equity that has vanished would have went away whether we had stayed or moved. And I can tell you for sure, we are much, much happier at this new place.

 As we've been outlining in previous posts, we immediately started a remodel to fit our tastes. One area that we have not touched at all (yet) is the back yard. It works well the way it is for now, and we were using the back patio as a staging area for new interior fixtures until February of this year.

 The worn patio furniture and Weber grill are holdovers from the previous house - we need to get better furniture some day. But for now, we have higher priorities. The back yard is not as shallow as it appears in this picture: the patio itself is 16 feet from the back of the house to the edge, and it is 20 feet from the edge of the grass to the back fence. A perfect size, really. Any bigger than that and landscapers charge a fortune, any smaller and I would feel boxed in. We have about 10 feet from the edge of the house to the fence on each side of the house. A little more would be nice, but nothing's perfect.

We haven't touched this area since we moved in.  It is overrun by blackberries and mint.

 If we zoom in above the fence, you can see there is a bare hill just one lot over. That is owned by the water district and, as near as I can tell, it is solid granite. For this reason, they ran the water pipeline over the top of the hill - you can see it if you look closely. We like the bare hill there - it gives us more privacy and more of an open feel.

 Directly behind us and down a 20 foot slope is another home, but it actually adds to the privacy, too. The windows you see peeking over the fence are actually in the upper bedrooms of the home, and they are narrow view windows above the normal windows. In other words, someone would have to get on a pretty tall ladder in order to look out those windows. If anybody is ever nosy enough to do that, they deserve what they see. :-P

 The only change we have made to the back yard is the removal of a wobbly wooden swing set from the dirt area towards the back of this photo. We are eventually going to use that area for a small pool, maybe extending out to the edge of the patio, but that will have to wait at least a year. There is a nice HOA-sponsored pool just 5 doors down anyway. For now, we'll use that.

 Lastly, we are pretty happy with the existing flowers. Normally, my style when planting is to have a massive area of one color, then a massive area of another, etc. But whomever planted this used little sprinkles of color everywhere.

 I think little sprinkles of color is more of a feminine way to plant, but it looks very good in the yard and kind of breaks us out of the normal, standard, masses of color style that our yards typically have. It is a nice change.

To break us out even more from the normal style pattern I have, we are likely to hire a landscape designer to handle the pool and spa when we get to that point. It would be nice to see someone else's spin on a construction project that we complete for a change. I guess I'm getting a little bored with my own style taste.