Back yard shenanigans

We are blessed to live in a great house in a great neighborhood. I'm not "house proud". It's not perfect, it's never going to be but it is home and we love it here. There is one area of our home that has plagued us from the beginning. The back yard. In England, referring to someone's outside space as a "yard" is an insult. They like the word "garden" better. We have a yard out back. A dusty, neglected piece of land that we had pretty much given up on. We've laid new grass twice and mulched the whole thing at one point (don't EVER do that) but it's stayed a mess.

Our house is the last one to be constructed in the neighborhood. That explains why we have found seventeen buckets of hardened concrete along with every form of building debris in our backyard during our other attempts at improving. This is where the construction trailer sat, and this is where remnants of whatever were dumped. We can't grow grass. The neighbors behind us have assorted weeds that creep in and take over because I'm too lazy to pull weeds every day. Sorry, but it's the truth. We finally decided that something had to be done. We settled on building a raised flagstone deck. It was a HUGE undertaking and it's not finished yet.

We've had two truckloads of dirt dumped on our driveway, the husband rented some sort of heavy equipment to move it to the back. Three teenagers worked two days with him to level dirt and lay stone. The cable guy had to come fix the barely buried cable that we stirred up while moving dirt and stone to the back. I've made runs for huge bags of ice, cases of bottled water and something called a tamper. They did the back breaking work in the heat only to discover that we don't have enough stone. Our deck is larger than the 16x35 feet it started out as, so we've got more stone in our future to finish this bad boy. And sod. Our side yard is torn up from that whatever-it's-called that the husband rented. That's a picture of him in it, by the way. He's smiling, so that's probably before it got stuck. Anyway. That's it for now.