Nice job on the deck ndv21. It looks great!
My wife likes a colorful and attractive yard so I've been slowly plugging away at doing stuff for her. I'm even starting to get into it myself more now than ever before.
We bought this house 3 years ago and since have put in a new deck, replaced the rotting wooden fence in the front yard, replaced the section of rotting wood fence in the back with chain link (it had the two sides in the back done with chain link, not sure why the back section was wood), and put in privacy slats in all the chain link fencing.
The following two pic's show the deck from the back of the house looking toward the front. The house is a "modular" home. Which is a fancy way of saying it was built somewhere else and shipped here in two pieces. The main floor is about 4 feet above ground level so the deck is that high and runs the entire length of the house.
The first pic shows our youngest (1.5 yr old) Yorkie, "Brutal" standing at the top of the back deck stairs.

This second picture shows our 6 yr old 'Bugg' (Boston Terrier/Pug cross) "Keyser Soze" standing in the same place. I included it cause he's kind of cute.....lol......yeah I know, I know! The wife didn't get a pic of our old guy (he's 14+) so you don't get to see him.......lol

This next one is the front yard. The fence in the front is 1 m (3 feet) high. That's the limit I can make it in front. It turns out my little monster dog, Brutal, can jump that high straight up. So to prevent him jumping the fence my wife decided we needed a two foot wide flower bed. On the inside of the flower bed is wire premade fencing bought at the hardware store. Of course, I had to buy double what I needed cause the little sh*t weighs only 11 lbs and could walk through the open spaces in the wire fencing......LOL. So I offset the second set and that slows him down. We filled the bed with hollyhocks. In a month or two they'll be 4 to 5 feet high and colorful. That'll keep the little monster in! Instead of removing the dead birch (it was dead when we bought the place) we decided to keep it and use it for hanging bird feeders and suets. We like birds and it works great for attracting them The flower bed around the dead birch is also new this year (oh my aching back!). The inner ring of that is sunflowers (giant ones) and the outer ring is gladiola's which are starting to pop up now.

This last is a view of the back from the deck stairs. I put in the flagstone style patio for the wife last summer. Instead of rock, I used patio blocks (the 2'x2' and 2" thick kind) I broke up. It's a design she saw on the web and liked. I think it looks not too bad now that the grass I planted in and around it is growing. I also added the little garden plot you see at the very back this year. We used 2"X"12" to make an 8' square and I filled it with 2 yards of topsoil. Unfortunately, where we live, I have about 6" of topsoil and then nasty hard clay that's like concrete. We've tried a garden before but it never grew well because of the lack of topsoil. I'm hoping this year it'll grow better.

This year I'm also going to be building a Pergola over the patio for my wife. Google that if you're interested, it's too hard to explain and in this case, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Just an FYI, I'm a computer geek by trade so building things is not my forte. I paid someone else to do the deck. My good friend and hunting partner is a Civil Engineer and he's going to help me get the Pergola started. I managed to do the patio without any help and actually had fun running the packer to tamp the sand down under the blocks.....LOL. Slowly but surely I learn things as I go and I do love learning, and working with my hands, so it's all good in the end.
I was never a big fan of yard work......I'd much rather sit in the sun and smoke a cigar than work....but I like everything my wife's done so far and love the flowers and plants she's adding. I've even gotten so I'm starting to enjoy the work. But, I still prefer sitting on the deck smoking a cigar.......LOL
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
***William Ernest Henley***
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