The inside of our house is AWESOME.  I love it more and more every day and rarely find anything that I don’t like.  It is wonderful not to have buyer’s remorse.  The outside of our house, though, needs a lot of work. 

The first big project was dubbed The Monster Bush.  It is actually Wisteria that has grown over the arch on our backyard gate.  Apparently people grow it over arches all the time so as to give the yard an enchanted garden look.  But ‘those people’ do not homeschool four young children, have only one weekend day to work on their yard, AND, they pay someone to keep it trimmed and looking beautiful and enchanting.  Ours was not enchanting.  It actually gave you the feeling of walking into the mouth of a giant monster that was eating you whole.  It was just about to gobble up our roof, our air conditioning unit (several feet away from the actual arch) and the neighbors house as well.  I tried to trim it a month ago and didn’t make hardly any progress on the look, but had a humungous pile of branches to show for my work.  A month later it had grown back to its original size!  That’s when we decided the whole thing had to go.  Or our home was going to look like this in a matter of months:

Today we decided to kill the beast once and for all.  We took drastic measures.  Rather than hack at the branches intertwined with each other and the arch any more, we just cut the arch off the fence!  Here is the before picture: (note, over the past week Rock has cut the branches enough so that none of them were connected to the ground and so it was dying and only a shadow of it’s former monster self.
 

The branches and leaves used to come down past Rock’s head.

After lopping off the arch:

And the  huge pile…that we now have to figure out how to get rid of.

I will say that demolition work like this is actually fun.  It beats weeding any day!