Outdoor Updates & A Tour: a house log

Ok, so plenty of people (me included) found this original exterior tour of our yard a bit hard to follow. Our first house was pleasant and plain. We could describe the back and the front and the sides and call it a day with this ol’ post of yore, which even included this little sketch:

But this house is simply waaay more complicated. Even though both plenty are about the same size (nearly an acre) this one is a lot less long and narrow than the last one. It is more fat and square-ish. And it has a lot more quirks like this little alley between the original part of the house and the addition in the back (more on that here)…

There are also areas that do not look like our property (like this slice of land on the left, which looks like it is outside the bounds of our house but is in fact ours)…

… and little brick paths that meander around the back and side yards…

So in an attempt to make sense of it all (or confuse everyone more, you decide) I did my best little sketch of our lot for you (and then scanned it and had lively coloring it in with Photoshop). Oh and obviously it is not to the same scale as the first sketch since this house looks ten times bigger. Oops.

And we thought that the be-all-end-all explanation would be this video that will hopefully assist you grasp the whole flow of our lot’s mojo (which is work-friendly if you play it on mute- but also funny not on mute thanks to some quite excited birds in the background):

And on the subject of our backyard, dude it has CHANGED (!!!) in the last few months. We have enjoyed watching it green up and were so surprised that the back portion of the lot which looked quite quite brown when we moved in…

… now looks oh so green and lush and a lot more private thanks to plenty of trees and grasses filling in. Not all the way, but we will take it:

We still have to plant some fast growing evergreens in some strategic spots to add to the privacy-factor (since this house not only has a house on each side of it, but one that can be seen from the back) but it is already feeling a lot less exposed now that plenty and plenty (and plenty) of trees have greened up and created some fairly strong leafy screens between us and the outside world. We certainly have a lot to do out there, but simply like our last house, we are planning to take our time and see where we end up. Should be lively in that dirt-under-the-nails kind of sore-but-satisfied way.

Have you folks been up to any outdoor stuff? Any dream outdoor features that you’d enjoy to add someday? Mine would be a deck for outdoor dining and some sort of elaborate tree house for the bean. Someday…