I have to start off by saying: the photos in this post don’t evennn kind of do justice to the chaos of what our property originally looked. Not. Even. A. Little. If you would like a little bit of visualization though, I can tell you in the first weekend we became homeowners we collected 17 tires, at least 5 down trees, 1,000 miles of vines, 5 empty fifths of liquor, 11 crushed beer cans and 64 water bottles filled with chewing tobacco just from our side yard. This doesn’t even include the nine-or-so raccoons that were living in the walls of our house.

The house was surrounded in one set of fencing, while the remainder of the yard was surrounded in a second set of fence. Talk about a headache and a lot of poles to pull out. We actually did a fairly large amount of clean up and removed all of the inner row of fence before we took these photos. When my nieces came over to see the property the first day we closed, I had to actually carry them through the yard because everything was so over grown they couldn’t walk around (they were also two and three years old at the time with little munchkin legs). So even though it looks like a hot mess – this is what a lot of sweat and beers got us to in the first days of our yard clean up!