Backyard renovation complete!

I'm so delighted to say that our backyard re-do is now done, and we spent several hours outside yesterday enjoying our new "huge" space.

Before, and this is a nice picture that hardly shows how bad it was:

A few weeks later, after many many people came over with buckets to haul away free rocks, we were still left with rocks embedded in mud.

So I hired someone to come and dig out the rocks, and he did an awesome job, though now I have a huge berm of mud and rocks on the side of my house.

Had to wait a few weeks for a bark duster to be available.  This is a really common product in Oregon.  Getting someone to actually show up was the bigger challenge, as usual.  I was starting to wonder if this is just an Oregon thing (showing up late, not showing up at all, whining), but then remembered my sister telling me a similar story about fence repair in TX ("you're the 3rd person I called, and the first to show up - you're hired").  I called her to complain and she let me in on a little secret about hiring contractors.  We followed her advice and had no problem.  They showed up without whining and did a great job.

I know my tablecloth is lame, just ignore that part.