Sodding and Landscaping

We've been in and getting settled for some time now. It is everything we had hoped it would be. We're living in a great neighborhood, with some wonderful people.

There are a couple more steps in the physical development of the house and the property that we want to capture on the blog before we wrap it up and close out this wonderful chapter in our lives and in our marriage.

The city of Blaine has a handful of requirements with landscaping, and some particular requirements for the Lakes development. For example, we were required to have two trees of a certain size in our front yard. We put in a "Spring Snow" up by our garage that will look very cool when it blooms in the Spring. Unfortunately, we learned after that it is considered "ornamental" and doesn't help us meet that two tree requirement. The other tree we put in initially is an autumn blaze maple. It is the tree up in the berm, and is supposed to turn a bold red in the fall. Later on, we decided to put an evergreen in the front off of our porch, but that isn't reflected in the pictures below.

Below are a couple of pictures of the sod arriving on the trucks. Kevin from B&D Bobcat and Landscaping was awesome throughout the process. We'd definitely recommend him.






Just like a room that isn't sheet rocked, property without the grade and sod looks a lot smaller before it is finished. As you can see from the picture above and the picture below, they had quite a few rolls of sod for the yard.


They started in the back corner and worked their way forward. Kevin had a good crew and they got the whole yard done in one day.

You will see below our little Honey Crisp Apple Tree. This is a gift from Grandma Labadie in honor of Sara's Grandfather. We're having some deer issues as it relates to the tree, but we're going to take care of it and help it grow into a nice Minnesota Honey Crisp tree. We're told it will be a few years until we see apples. We're excited for Grandma Labadie to visit us in Minnesota as the tree grows and can't wait until she can bake us a pie with the fruit from the tree.




This is the view from our front porch of the newly sodded yard. We've got a great sunset view and (at least until that lot is built on) a great view of the lake across the street.



Se have a lot of work to do planting shrubs and flowers in the berm and in front of the porch, but here is our house with the new yard starting to take root. We're really excited about the way it turned out.