Our front yard was the bane on the neighborhood. The "before pic" does it little justice because there was a wonderful tree whose roots ahd grown up over the hard pan keeping water from staying in the yard and breaking up the side walk. This meant that in order to keep it green like in the before picture, the previous owners dumped hours worth of water into it. So the tree was removed and the sidewalk replaced. I could not water the yard with that much water and still feel good about how I was living and I hated mowing a freaking 4 foot tall hill so we stopped the water waste and yard was brown and weed covered and became the worst yard in the entire neigborhood, litterally. The pic doesn't really do it justice as it had 3 years to deteriorate after that photo. And you can't see the water-sucking slope very well...

So we paid someone a lot of money to put in a wall and cement stairs and I put the flagstone on the path and the facing onthe stairs. The city put in a new tree for us and we will be getting another shade tree from them next spring.


Now all we have to do is put in a sprinkler system and plants. We now have the best looking wall on the block and my nieghbors stopped comlianing about our yard. We may even use it now that it is so inviting! Whoopeee!