The Side Yard - Part 1

This weekend we dove into a project I just know is going to take many weekends so I decided to blog as we go along.

We have had a carport to the north side of our house. When we moved in, we thought this was a great idea because we could park one car in the garage and one in the carport. Then the garage turned into storage and nobody wanted to park in the carport and we got in the habit of tossing stuff in it that we could just deal with later. In other words, it's an eyesore.

We started talking about taking it down and we each had our own ideas of what might look better over there. I pushed hard for all grass, the hubs really wanted a concrete sport court but what we've landed on is a new vegetable garden, a shed and grass around it all. We love our garden but we want it bigger and better and prettier.

I realized that I hated our carport so much that all photos taken of the house cut it off but here's a picture from Friday just as Mr. BSR was getting to work taking it apart:

We store lots of lumber scraps from past projects, things I've collected along the way, tools, etc. But that is no more!

Then he got a little helper:

We're going to build a shed to house the things we still want to keep (most of what you see there in the back) as well as a firewood nook but we want to use some of the wood from the carport to build it. That meant we had to take down half of it but left up the other half to protect our stuff while we're building a new place to put it. Sometimes our projects remind me of these things:

Here's what we had accomplished by the end of the day Sunday:

Half the carport is completely gone (hooray!!) and we've cleared the way to start building the shed up against  the side of the house. Mr BSR did most of the work although I periodically loaded up the little dude and paced around the construction zone.

(Note to self: sand and paint the holes you spackled.)

Here are some inspiration photos I've got pinned over on Pinterest:

I can't decide if I want the roof line of the shed to mirror that of the end of the house where it'll be:

Source: woodcraft.com via Julie on Pinterest

or if I want it to just slope straight off the house:

   

Source: familyhomeplans.com via Julie on Pinterest

I like the wood cubby on the end of this one. 

Source: familyhomeplans.com via Julie on Pinterest

And we're going to have raised vegetable garden beds with gravel in between. Sadly, we won't have a view of rolling hills but our neighbor's yard is almost as nice - they have a trampoline.

Source: tucsonraisedgardenbeds.com via Julie on Pinterest

So, there you have some of the inspiration I'm working off of. This will no doubt take us a good bit of the summer to accomplish but I'm eager to get rid of some of the gravel, all of the carport and to introduce a beautiful new garden space and some more grass.

Thank you for reading,
Julie