Goodbye Garden Swing

This past weekend I had my father and brother down to help me with a couple of projects in the yard.  The first project was our garden swing in the English garden. 

The swing has been conspicuously absent in photos for a while… that’s because I was going to repaint it since the paint was peeling.  :(  But then I thought I would replace it with kid swings since my nieces would love that!  But we had noticed that the standards of the swing frame were leaning towards the woods and also the whole thing rocked when you swung on it.  Not good.  So, we decided to tear down the “swing set” and replace it.  Papa and John came to do the demo work since it was too big for me to deal with.  (Thanks guys!)

I did the prep work before they arrived and dug out around the posts so we could see what we were dealing with.

They were rotted almost in two.  There wasn’t a lot of wood left  in the ground to hold up the swing.  :(  When the boys (I mean men) arrived they made swift work of dismantling the swing set.  And they saved every piece of lumber and every fastener.  Thrifty.

This is all that remained of the first post when it broke off at the base.

And the second one shredded, too.  Good bye rickety old swing set.

Once it was down, I noticed how open everything looked.  So, in an effort to save time and money rebuilding a swing set that we hardly used, we decided to do away with the swing and not replace it.  No more swing.  Sorry nieces! 

I am really enjoying the new view.  And we didn’t stop there!  Once the swing was gone there was a whole new garden space that needed filling.  So we spent the rest of the weekend cleaning up the brick patio and planting some new shrubs…  I’ll be back later this week to fill you in on those details! :) 

Meanwhile, can we discuss how lovely my grass is?  Just lovely.  I am reseeding the area in front of the steps and when that comes in I will do a full reveal on the backyard grass project. :)  Yay Spring!

I have several more Spring projects under my sleeve that I will be posting about soon including an update on the paver patio, backyard flower bed progress, and a follow-up in the English garden!   Stay tuned!