Yellow Crayon

Home Improvement

I’m concerned that my husband is afraid of me. Here’s why. When we first started talking about building a deck in the backyard I knew I wanted it to be BIG (by the way, we starting making plans for this deck before the house was even completed…almost six years ago.) I wanted it to be big because I wanted family and friends to feel welcome – my house is wonderful for my husband and I but add two more people and the “entertaining” area is down right cramped.

Now when we began revisiting the notion of building a deck early this spring my husband and I stood out in the backyard and he asked “How big do you want it?” 

“I want it to run along the whole back of the house”, was my response. This seemed like a logical size to me. I don’t live in a palatial estate. I live in a ranch-style house that only contains 4 dining room chairs so I felt rational while standing in the backyard with my arms stretched wide to indicate the scope of my dream deck.

“How wide do you want it?” 

“Wide enough so we can have your whole family over.”

Our completed our deck measures 41 feet long x 19 feet wide. It is bigger than the apartment my husband and I lived in when we were first married.  

This spring, summer and fall we were able to complete most of the deck – there is just a bit of “finish work” to be done next spring. It is monstrous. A sane husband would’ve said “You know the size you’re suggesting is a bit large for our yard…and our purposes.” My wonderful husband is clearly petrified of me…he continues to respond to my crack pot ideas with, “Okay.”

5% less white trash then when I woke up this morning.

My backyard is a hell-hole. Five years ago when my husband I built our house we were in a mad rush to get our landscaping finished so we could close on the house…and by landscaping, I mean sod and a pine tree. Oh, and a hot tub…without a cover.

For the last five years our yard has limped along due to busy summer schedules (my husband works 70, 80, sometimes 90 hours in the summer) but this year we finally turned the front yard into something decent – the pine tree is thriving, shrubs have been appropriately pruned and I finally gave up on flowers…I can barely get drought-resistant native plants to thrive, let alone Gerber Daisies. 

While we’ve been employing the trial and error planting system to our front yard our backyard has been n-e-g-l-e-c-t-e-d. Sometime in the last few years we’ve planted a Globe Willow and a few shrubs but I really could not tell you how they are doing since I can’t bear to look at them out of shame. The Naughty Dogs, Duke and Juneau the Wicked, have dug huge holes all over the hard...I fell in one a few years ago and sprained my ankle while my husband was taking the Christmas lights off of our house, in May. Not kidding. 

But the centerpiece of the backyard is the hot tub. This was a hand-me-down hot tub that my husband had up and running when he lived with roommates while we were dating…one roommate owned a Wolf. Yes, I said Wolf…it makes Juneau the Wicked look like a piece of cake. One day, the bored Wolf who I imagine was dreaming of chasing the mighty Buffalo through Yellowstone, sat on top of the hot tub and ate the cover. Chewed the whole thing to pieces. Hence moving the hot tub to our new house, sans cover.

Since you can’t fill a hot tub without a cover and since as young new home owners there is always something more pressing on your finances than a hot tub cover, it has sat in our backyard for five years filling with rain, snow, dirt, trash and the West Nile virus. At one point the sides had to be removed because we discovered that all of the water-less hoses and orifices in the hot tub made an IDEAL home for wasps. We went through four cans of wasp killer the day we pulled the wood panels off and then we had to hide in our house for weeks while the wasps plotted revenge.

Well, yesterday it snowed and my husband finally had a day off work so the hot tub was hauled off to the dump. My shrubs are still woefully undernourished, the tree needs pruning and the dogs will continue to dig, but the blight on our backyard is gone. 

Merry Christmas Neighbors.