Step One

A couple weeks ago, I started to tell you about our yard.  And it is a big mess.  But the part that drives me the most crazy (besides the no grass issue) is this:

 This is on the side of the house and I am sooooooooo glad that I can't really see it from inside because otherwise my head would have surely exploded by now.  Here is a break down of what exactly you are looking at.  Under the big blue tarp is all of the wood that is "drying" (aka needs to be split and stacked) for next year.  This big pile...

 needs to be chipped.  But since we need to rent a chipper we (and by that I mean he) feel the need to have every spare branch on our property in the pile.  Two and a half years later, mission not even close to accomplished. 

And this area?

 I have no idea what is going on.  It is the dumping ground for everything and it drives.  me.  batty.

The problem with this area is that we need to chip the branches but to do that we need to get the wood chopped and stacked but to do that we need to build a wood shed but to do that we need to chip the bracnches.  Can you see why we haven't started yet?

Our goal (I should say MY goal...time lines aren't really his thing) is to have this area ship shape by mid summer.  Here's what we have to do:

Chip branches

Spread chips

Build wood shed

Chop wood

Stack wood

Today, we got started on the wood shed.  Paul Bunyan Robbie got to work cutting down some trees to build it out of.  Yeah, we're building our own wood shed.  Since my lumberjack husband has little experience falling trees, we all watched from a safe distance.

 That's when things started to get all "Little House on the Prairie".  We used a tool (that of course my dad had) to scrape all of the bark off our trees.

 Everyone helped.  Especially Ben.  He'll do just about anything if he gets to wear his new work gloves!

 Abby wore my gloves.  And earlier she got to pick our some candy from the gas station.  Obviously, it was blue.  I was a little concerned that it would stain but I shouldn't have worried because by the end of the day all of the dirt on her face had washed the blue off.

So we've started...sort of.  I sleep a lot better when I can actually cross things off my list.  And you'll notice that chop down/debark trees was not on my list.  But it had to be done.  Next up, we are going to rent a chipper in the very near future and get that mess of branches taken care of because then we can build the wood shed in the corner where the branches now live and then we can stack the wood and then I can start crossing things off!  Stay tuned.