This post has no pictures of its putative subjects. It is entirely dedicated to the landscaping project. Its main purpose is to show the work, so text is minimal.
The 2024 landscaping project began very early on the morning of Thursday, October 3. That’s when the crew arrived and began work.
In the run-up to that date, however, there was a lot of prep to take care of.
The big green box out in the “back alley,” for example, had to be emptied of its cushions, cleaned, and moved out of the way.
Yes, it was full of snails, dead spiders, and all kinds of nastiness. The cushions were covered in bug shit and got knows what else and therefore ended up going straight to the dump.
The landscapers would be clearing away the old woodshed, but I first had to move all the firewood out of the way and get rid of the piles of bricks and pallets underneath them.
We were fortunately low on firewood, but it was still a lot of work.
They’d also be clearing out the mulch pile, but unfortunately we couldn’t afford to replace our dilapidated toolshed on this go round.
Here’s the northwest corner of the property.
Looking southeast from the same spot where I was standing to take the picture above:
The carport.
The bottom of the stairwell leading into the garage:
See that water there? In heavy rains—skybrud, or cloudbursts—this well could fill up so quickly that I would often have to stand guard and literally bail it out for as long as the rain lasted. Heavy snowmelts produced the same effect. Failure to bail meant the garage would flood.
The next picture sort of shows why:
The path to the garage slopes very gradually down toward that stairwell, so our whole yard was basically a funnel directing water into our garage. Not very clever, and that was the what put the impetus into our having this work done.
Here’s a shot looking north from the garage path toward the carport.
Looking from the terrace toward the southeast corner of the yard:
Looking from the same spot toward the garage:
The wreckage you see in the above shot are the contents of the nice planters we normally had on the brickwork there: we had to clear them for the landscapers, and they’d told us just to throw any old organic waste onto the lawn, since they’d be tearing it all up anyway.
That’s it for the “before” shots.
Well, that and all the tens of thousands of yard pictures scattered across this blog over the last 15 years.
The next set of pictures are the “during” shots. I won’t comment much, because the pictures tell the story.
(Yes, I used the wide-angle feature for a lot of pictures, like those above and below, to try and capture as much as possible.)
Funny thing about the above picture: we had no idea the brickwork ran out that way. That all been under grass. It made sense for it to be there: to its left, for the first 4-5 years we lived here, there’d been a bricked-off little garden, a couple of square meters of arable earth. We never managed to make much of it and eventually decided we’d rather have more yard and less dying vegetable plants.
The next shot is looking out our bedroom window, down onto the hole and clearing the landscapers had been forced to make to get their equipment down to the old pool machine room (under the bulkhead beneath our window).
That’s the Hybenvej street-side view of the hole referred to above.
The next shot is from a vantage point on Hybenvej in front of our garage: that’s it’s northeast corner on the right side of the shot:
The former pool machine room bulkhead, which had since the basement renovations of 2022 just been a big empty hole covered by rotting plywood and a shredded plastic tarp:
Did I mention all this was going on while our American friends Geoff and Austin were staying with us for a visit? This is how the backyard looked during the weekend of their stay:
Looking out of the garage:
Taken from the extreme southeast corner of our property:
From in front of the garage, looking straight (north) up Hybenvej:
Woodshed gone:
Mulch box gone:
Hole glaring:
At this point of disarray we had our electrician come out and lay down the cables for the yard lights. This first shot is looking down into the bowels of the yard light we’ve always had beside the garage:
Now some shots from the rooftop:
I can’t believe I took this next one: I get a little vertigo just looking at the picture! (Looking down on the filled machine room.)
The destruction complete, the creation begins.
We hit one serious snag: the underground pipe carrying water from the house to the garage wasn’t buried as deeply as the landscapers expected, so in digging for the improved garage stairwell they cut into it.
We had to bring Geoff and Austin around to every hardware store in the kommune looking for a bit of pipe to replace the damaged bit of pipe, and failed. We were terrified what would happen Monday morning, when work had to resume and we had been told they expected the pipe to have been replaced.
Fortunately they had a guy available who was able to patch the damage in less than an hour.
The offending bit of pipe:
The carport:
No more bailing out the garage stairwell!
And finally. . . the grass arrives.
And then the arrival of the cherry laurels.
Trine got them to place two laurels in the gap they’d created.
(The carport bricks will be replaced with matching tiles eventually.)
This little area is going to be for some flower beds:
There were some minor issues with some of the tiles not settling perfectly flush:
And the landscapers hadn’t tidied up quite as thoroughly as they were supposed to. . .
. . . but those issues were dealt with within a week or two of the main work ending.
That’s it. I suppose the real after pictures will come next spring and summer.
It’s December 5 as I write this, and the carpenters just installed the gates a few days ago (one by the carport allowing entré to the yard, and one around back allowing entré from the backyard to the “alley”).
And that’s it. . . project complete!
