Little Dove Creations: yard reveal: phase 1

If you follow me on Instagram (thanks by the way!) then you know that early Saturday morning we got our sod delivered! Oh, happy day!

But, before all those beautiful rolls of sod showed up in our driveway, there was a lot of hard work that went into the process.

You can see what we started with almost exactly two years ago in {this} post.

Then, in the fall of last year {this} post made y'all jealous with how great our yard was looking (note heavy sarcasm here).

But finally, in January I shared with you {this} post that showed all the excitement that was removing those pesky Juniper stumps and leveling out our yard (completely serious, note the lack of sarcasm here).

And, I'm sorry, but when did my husband learn how to install an automatic sprinkler system?! I don't remember when they studied that in Dental school. Yep, he's pretty much a stud. :)

So, the weekend prior we had gotten our top soil delivered and spent the week making sure things were nice and level. You don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a lawn and then have it be full of divots and hills!

To do this, you basically wet the soil, then rake every few days, allowing the ground to settle in between. The Friday night before our sod was delivered Mike used the roller we had rented to really make sure that things were flat and smooth.

Here's what the yard was looking like early Saturday morning. Honestly, I already saw this as a huge improvement over what the yard looked like when we bought the house.

Since the sod got delivered a full hour before it was supposed to be (When are deliveries ever early?! We were so happy!), Mike got to work by himself, with me on watering duty every 30 minutes; but by the time our first 30 minutes came around people had started showing up to help.

My heart was seriously full with the outpouring of love and support that we received from our friends and members of our church. Some of these guys even had an Eagle Project right after this, and then a move to help with later in the afternoon and still they showed up at 9:00 am on a Saturday morning.

With all of their help the lawn was finished in less than two hours and I was so glad that Mike hadn't had all that strenuous work to do by himself.

Because let's face it, as a woman nearly 21 weeks along in her fourth pregnancy I wasn't going to be toting around heavy rolls of sod and bending over all day. Sorry.

Also, we've learned that our kids can't be left alone for too long inside the house while we're working on things outside. Bad things happen.

So here's where we stand at the end(ish) of Phase One. I still can't get over how much better it looks! We are definitely not the eye sore of the neighborhood anymore!

We had a lot of neighbors stop by on their walks and tell us how great it was looking. I kept waiting for someone to stop and admonish us for laying a big lawn in the middle of a drought, but so far no one has. :) Honestly, the way I look at it, we've been saving water for nearly eight years of marriage because we never had a lawn to water, so now it's our turn.

Now it's time to start working on preparing the side yard for the sprinkler system and seed, which we'll be planting in the Fall. But for now, I finally feel like we can breath a sigh of relief