Home Improvement: Backyard Fence

Since our house is in great shape inside (thank you previous home owners for giving us calming, neutral paint colors!), we continue to work on the outside of our house.  The yard, especially the backyard fence, was overrun with English ivy.  There were also some holes along the back fence that concerned us after Parker and the dog behind us snarled at each other through them.

BEFORE: Out where Parker is sniffing is all ivy.  Notice
the ghetto looking fix Jason did to the fence to keep
the dogs from seeing each other

BEFORE

BEFORE:  The front fence was covered in ivy too

So step 1 was to get a handle on the ivy.  The tree company that removed our big front sycamore tree also removed a bunch of trees and ivy from the back.

The back corner is looking much more managable now!

But when they cut the massive amounts of ivy trees/bushes/whatever they are off, our fence was in bad shape.  Luckily the tree guys didn't cut down our money tree and Long Fence gave us a sweet deal on a new fence...

A glimpse at an open yard.  Kind of nice to freely talk to my neighbors,
but let's be real people, a fenced in backyard is this mama's
dream come true.  It was all going back up

While the fence was done, the swingset from our neighbor's
yard got moved to ours.  Score!

Also while the fence was down I tried to clean up as much of the ground ivy as I could.  I have probably bagged around 15 plus black bags of ivy the past few months.  That stuff is no joke friends.  And sadly it will never go away.  Thankfully, we have it under control... for now.

Ta-da!  Our new and improved backyard!

Front fence with Parker's stash of tennis balls

Driveway fence.  Easy open and close now

a beautiful new fence for our new neighbors.  Welcome!

Love, love, love.

We decided to get a 6 foot privacy fence across the back with 5 foot picket fences around the rest.  I love it.   I can't wait to talk over the fence to my new neighbors (before we had 6 foot fences on the sides).  So worth the money, back pain, and hours of picking ivy.  We are ready to entertain!