cue quincy jones

I can't tell you how much I wish I had an after shot for you here. This was pretty much the state of the front section of our backyard for the last two months.

We did hire a "clean-up" guy last week. He came the following day and removed a lot of metal. We really had a lot of metal. Someone had been hoarding it in the basement. Most importantly, he removed the stinky old stove that none of us could lift out to the curb. He even had a red pick-up truck ala Sanford and Son!

Alas, he too must have been scared away by the swarms of mosquitoes and the never-ending clean-up job. He never showed up again.

Fortunately, our amazing neighborhood gardener, Winston has saved us from our festering junk heap! Winston does work for our neighbor who has an almost identical house to us. I say almost identical because their house was not renovated in the 30's and because compared to ours, it looks like heaven. Manicured lawns and perfectly trimmed hedges with fresh exterior paint and I can only imagine inside! Ahh.
Winston does a lot of the houses in the neighborhood - he will come around when he thinks something needs trimmed and just work. He's a little hard to find - we begged our neighbor to send him over to us next time he saw him. Eventually, I would like to do the gardening myself. I love garden work. For now, I'm extremely overwhelmed with all of the weeds, vines, hedges that tower above me and did I mention the bamboo?! If you look to the left of the top photo in this post (above the pile of dried ivy) you'll see we have a bamboo forest taking over our yard. It extends way beyond the lattice and into the middle of the yard. If anyone needs bamboo for a project, let me know - you are more than welcome to take as much as you need.
We hired Winston to remove the roots of the ivy around the house since we are already getting re-sprouts here and there. He performed nothing short of a miracle yesterday in rounding up all of the garbage in the yard and sorting it into bags and bundling vines and wood. Now we can actually set it all out on the curb on garbage day. Not all at once, but at least it's very manageable now. We can see the stone patio now and even found a strange thing resembling a headstone sticking out of the ground! I highly doubt it's a headstone but I can't imagine what it could be. I'll need to shoot some pics and ask for opinions.

I do however have some recent photos highlighting the new lighting in our kitchen and dining room. Check them out:

No, nothing looks finished yet. But we're hoping that one day soon it will be!