Landscaping

Ever since we bought our house here in Stafford, we have had problems with the backyard, mostly because nothing had ever been done with it. This is our backyard when we first bought the house, the deck is in our neighbor's yard. Our house sits level to the backyard, so we decided to put in a patio instead of a deck. Less up keep with a patio and it was a lot cheaper.

The main problem with the yard is that our house sits at the bottom of a hill, and all the water flows down the hill and turns right into our house. There is no good drainage path, so when we have heavy rains, which are frequent in Virginia, the water would just build up by the house.

So, for reasons that I will go into in my next post, Jay decided that after living like this for six years, the time had come to do something about the flooding in the backyard. He worked day and night for about two months, after work and on weekends, and pretty much dug up the whole yard, graded the yard away from the house, put drainage pipes through the yard, and built a beautiful retaining wall with drainage pipes behind it. Then he put sod down and lots of rocks to help with the drainage. He and Jake did all this by themselves, my only contribution was bringing them cold water and helping to carry in the bricks for the wall. It looks beautiful and we have had hard rains since completion, and not a drop of water accumulates by the house. I am so proud of all their hard work!

The finished yard. It's beautiful!