BurnsFamily Blog

We wanted a water fountain for our backyard but we couldn’t find anything we liked in the stores or online. So we decided to build one ourselves. It took a while to find out how to make one properly: refills itself automatically, features of a good fountain pump, requires little-to-no maintenance, the proper materials […]

Welcome to our new backyard!
We expect to throw lots of BBQ parties, relax after a hard day’s work, and just general “spending quiet time”. We’ll give you the virtual tour to help explain what you’re seeing.

Welcome to our private garden! That cobalt blue planter you saw from the front porch provides the guest of “hints” of what they can expect to see  in the rest of the garden as you walk through…
It’s a nice, quiet place: the fence panels block the view from the street but because there’s access from […]

Our goal was to be done by Memorial Day and to throw a celebration BBQ. Secretly we also set that deadline as motivation to make sure we finished and did all the little “clean up” tasks that always seem to linger and never get 100% done.
We’re proud to say that we hit our goal and […]

We turned the 90+˚ heat wave into pure productivity. We started the day off with 6 cubic yards of bark nuggets (but really, who doesn’t?) then proceeded to lay out the plants in their positions:

This weekend we completed the landscaping project’s last major construction phase: enclosing the “garden” area next the house, just off the dining room. It looks great! And it feels like we’ve added a new living space to our house. We used to call this our “rose garden” because there were so many roses […]

When is a chop saw, a laser level, and lumber considered part of landscaping? I don’t know either, but that’s what we’re working on for this phase of the landscaping project.
Here’s a sneak peek at the next stage of landscaping.
Can you figure out what we’re building? More pix tomorrow…

Tonight Julie and I finished installing the main drip irrigation which will water all of the backyard’s raised beds and ground cover. (Psst! Wanna know the trick to slip drip irrigation tubing together with barbed slip connectors?

When we removed all the scrub trees and overgrown landscaping a few years ago our pair of morning doves looked downright depressed and confused. Nowhere to land or explore. And the blue jays that used to “squawk” us awake every morning would fly in occasionally, but wouldn’t hang around for long.

It was HOT today - 84 degrees! To commemorate the temperature of the day, we installed that many plants in a day. Have you bought stock in Ibuprofen yet?
We originally played it “safe” and only ordered 44 plants — we didn’t know how many we could install at once.