Painting Me A Yard

Being so up close and personal with my staircase, hours at a time over weeks, and thanks to sudden cold snaps indicating that spring hasn't officially arrived yet, I'm more in the mood for digging in my yard, planting all kinds of cool, interesting and exotic plants and generally turning my weedy back yard into a beautiful green oasis behind my house (that, and the front yard, of course).

Alas, for the time being this will have to wait; at least until after stripping the last spindle and, you know, maybe painting the house first?

BUT ... I just couldn't help think about it, pin plenty of pretty pictures on pinterest (here, if you want to see what catches my eye) and even check out some books on landscaping small yards from the public library.

Our back yard is small, and about half of it is taken up by the above ground pool we need to keep us alive and Little Man and friends entertained during the sweltering hot Florida summers. Like ceiling fans, it's not a pretty asset but a necessary one. Anyways, small yard. It's plenty for us and the pup to romp around, have barbecues, grow some veggies, keep some bees, and more while not overwhelming us in sheer size when it comes to maintenance.

In order to just fiddle and  tweak a few ideas I'd seen on the internet and liked very much, I sketched in the fixed points in our yard on a piece of paper:

• the back door stoop and steps
• the pool
• the ac compressors
• the steps to the shed

Then I slid that sketch into a sheet protector aaaaaand .... grabbed some dry-erase markers so I could doodle and draw and experiment with shapes to my heart's delight without having to re-draw everything!

 

If a design doodle didn't turn out right, I could just erase it without having to draw up a new sketch - so much easier than digging up that yard again!

 

Here are a few designs that turned out not looking shabby at all. In this one, for example, I enlarged the current patio to include the area along the house all the way to the side entrance and added a garden swing like this one here in the corner.

  

In this design I went a bit crazy with the whole circle lawn idea. It's better suited for a bigger yard than mine. It did sound like a good idea when I first thought about it ...

The husband is not a big fan of checker board lawns but I'm still digging them a lot (maybe because I'm the one mowing the current lawn). Maybe it's a bit too contemporary for our Little Old House though. The dotted areas are gravel and the boat-shapes are stand-ins for hammocks. We don't have large trees for that purpose but plugging some sturdy 6x6 or even railroad ties into the corner and adding hooks would work just as well.

We are expecting yet another cold snap this weekend with temperatures dipping down as low as 37F at night (Brrrrr ... cold) so I'll spend the next evenings doodling and driving the husband insane with all kinds of crazy new ideas I'll bring home from the Home & Patio Show on Saturday. What are your plans for the weekend? Doing anything fun?