Here’s a tip – use craigslist to get your yard work done for free.
Our backyard is lovely — we even held our wedding there. After the wedding, though, maintaining it felt like more trouble than it was worth: trimming bushes, weeding gravel pathways, and keeping everything tidy. Besides, our energetic eight-pound puppy would prefer more open space for chasing bugs.
So we decided to turn most of it into lawn — nice, simple grass that’s already worth firing up the mower for.
Our first task was removing the obstacles: bushes, the gravel path, and other bits we didn’t want to keep. We didn’t want to throw everything away, especially since I had just laid down new pea gravel three months earlier for the wedding.
Enter craigslist. Sherry posted a listing on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. with a photo and a note offering the bushes for free. I didn’t expect much to happen.
By 10:30 a.m., our driveway was filling with people armed with shovels and pickaxes. When I got home from work, most of the bushes were gone — except for a couple of sweaty, shirtless strangers still digging. One fellow even handed us $100 to claim six large bushes!
We tried the same approach the next morning with the pea gravel. By evening, nearly all of it had been raked, shoveled, and wheelbarrowed away. “Free” really is a universal motivator.
We didn’t have to do the heavy labor ourselves — aside from handing out water to the tired volunteers — and our yard now looks a bit raw but much more ready for grass seed.
PS: We plan to save the arch and relocate it elsewhere in the yard. After all, we were married under it.