BurnsFamily Blog

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:

Yes — the rumors are true. The Burnses finally have a lawn. And there was much rejoicing among the neighbors (no, seriously!).
The sod arrived at 9:30am and the last piece went down 6 hours later . Finally gave the irrigation system something to do, it was feeling neglected. For the first week we’ve been […]

Wohoo! The flagstone gods took pity on us this weekend and helped make everything “just fit” with very little effort. The pallets of flagstone precariously perched in our driveway is now gone, and all of the designated areas in the front- and back-yards are now “pieced”. It looks really great.

Is there a home improvement project that DOESN’T benefit from power tools? So far we can’t find one, and fitting flagstone has proven this Truth again. In a previous post we mentioned that gently asking the flagstone to follow our commands and crack along a prescribed line was … well … frustrating.
Creating a large […]

It’s only taken us 10 years but we finally have a proper front entrance walkway for our house. We no longer have to trek through mud, lawn, or a disfunctional sidewalk to greet our guests.
Last night we finished the front walkway by packing and sweeping cement in between the seams of the flagstone, then […]

The progress is slow, but steady. Apparently flagstone has a mind of its own when you apply a cold chisel to it. We are clearly scribing lines where we’d like the crack to follow. But no…it’s mostly random. We’ve changed our tactics and are now letting the shapes dictate their location.
Number of days since […]