Part of living in a recession is having vacant houses in your neighborhood. We have been experiencing this first-hand with a house on a corner lot on our street.
We weren’t sure what the story was, but about a year ago somebody stopped taking care of the yard. Since then the city came out once and basically bush hogged the high weeds, but didn’t do a thorough job by any means.
Ben got a whim on Saturday and suggested we take matters into our own hands. When we measured, the tallest weeds were over 3 feet high!
This house is on one of our typical walking routes we take Cali on. We’ve been forced to walk on the street because the weeds were crowding the sidewalk.
After we got started, the next door neighbor came over and told us the situation. The lady who lived there had a stroke, was put into a nursing home, died shortly thereafter and, since her family wasn’t able to pay, the nursing home took ownership of her house. Now, no one is willing to take responsibility.
We started with the weed eater and cut down the overgrown areas. Look, it’s a rare pic of me doing manual labor (my sunglasses doubled as safety glasses)!
Mr. Muscles did a lot of tough raking that day!
Then I went through and mowed the entire yard TWICE – once on the highest setting and then on a lower setting so it would be good-to-go for winter.
3 grueling hours and 5 bags of trimmings later, we were finally done!
Here it is all spruced up! All in all, it was a great way to spend our Saturday morning. We met 3 neighbors we hadn’t met before and a couple of them even trimmed the hedges later that day to help out with the project.
Please note that we did this for purely selfish reasons of wanting to make our neighborhood look nicer and to have access to the sidewalk on our walks. Ben joked about sending an invoice to the city for our gas and labor:)
Anyone else have vacant properties in your neighborhood? Can you top our crazy hard-labor adventure? What other ladies prefer mowing to bagging any day?
