2019 was all about sewage

To interrupt your feed full of holiday posts and Christmas lights, I wanted to share a little recap of our 2019.  If anyone is still reading?  I’m not sure, but here goes, anyway.  I have had a very boring several months when it comes to house projects.  We had the very unglamorous and expensive project of digging up our old clay sewer pipes and replacing them with PVC in April, and since then it’s just been a bit of landscaping and surviving parenting for us.

This project was pretty crazy, it cost us about 7k and was unfortunately necessary because our sewer was backing up in our laundry room every few months despite rodding.   Our sewer pipe was also off-center from the main sewer line by several inches.  I am just imagining how much sewage was pumping into our yard because the pipes didn’t line up.  Ugh!

 I’m so glad we did this now, and not after we got a patio put in at the bottom of the stairs!

You can see the impressive pile of dirt (that is a generous description, it’s more like clay rocks) that was left when they dug out the pipe.  They went 10 feet down near the fence!

And now, 8 months later, we are still left with an ugly line of dirt rocks.  It has been so annoying to walk over dirt or walk all the way around it to avoid the mud.  We are hopeful that the snow this winter will tamp it down enough that we can lay sod next summer.  Here it was around September:

And here is it NOW, in December:

It’s definitely sinking down, but ever so slowly!  I added some new decor and seating this year, we officially became the ‘driveway drinking’ family and it has been amazing.  We are lucky enough to be in a great neighborhood of friends, and they often stop by and pull up a chair when we are hanging out in front. 

 It also flowered well into fall, it was awesome!

 Obviously, it was gray and needed to be deep cleaned. 

The deck about a month after staining:

I know composite decking is so convenient, but nothing beats the look of natural wood for me!  I was excited to add to my planting areas this year.  I raised Monarch butterflies all summer, so putting in pollinator friendly plants was on my list!  Here are some of the areas my butterflies loved the most:

 The cardinal flower is so pretty with the dark foliage!

Can’t wait to see this fill in.  I planted a ton of milkweed for the caterpillars, here is a grouping of swamp milkweed, I also put in some common in other areas. 

I got so many butterflies on these plants!

 Look at how torn the wings are on this one…living it’s best short life!

It was so awesome to see the amount of birds, butterflies, and bees we had in our yard this year.  I plan to introduce even more native perennials that pollinators love next year!

And here are some random photos of the rest of our growing and monarch season:

 We planted an apple tree last year, and it had several apples on it until squirrels ate them!

Our monarch journey has been pretty amazing, but also pretty time-consuming.  I still can’t wait to start again next summer!

We are working on a rather cool project in our basement right now, I’m excited to share as we get closer to completion!  I might pop on here with a little Christmas post, too.  Until next time!