Our HUGE Backyard Makeover! From GRASS to GARDENS (& more)

Hello everybody! Welcome back to our YouTube channel. This feels a little bit weird to be filming. We did take a bit of a hiatus from posting after we finished our Ditching the Split series and you guys have seen all of the front of our house but I honestly think the backyard is the main attraction. So we are going to ease back into our content with a backyard tour today. I'm hoping that you guys can draw some inspiration from our backyard to your own home. If you're a longtime follower I know you're probably familiar with our backyard but a lot of you are new here and so I think you'll enjoy seeing everything we've done to our backyard. When we moved here it was a blank slate. It was just grass and a couple plants. Bring him down. Show everybody what is he doing. What are you doing? Are you excited to be filming again? So when we moved here our backyard was really a blank slate. It was just all grass. There was no fencing. There was a couple little bushes and then this tree here but we started from scratch and put all the gardens in ourselves. Decorations, the vegetable garden, all of the planting, we did all of that ourselves. So for the sake of this tour we are going to focus on this side of the yard. I don't want you guys to see what's going on on the other side of the yard yet because you'll hear about that soon. I think we're going to start with the gardens then we'll go to the treehouse then we'll go to the pool. There's a lot to see so I hope you enjoy a long video. Anything you want to say babe? Do you want to get in front of the camera at all? I'm so in that. I wonder if it'll be better if I hold the mic for this. You think? Okay we'll do it like it's a tiny little microphone because it is. First stop on our garden tour today is going to be what I call our little bird area. I love being a bird mom and we have our frequent flyers and our regulars that attend our buffet every day as well as the spa. It is out of birdseed again. We do have a raccoon that comes every night and feasts here so I have to get more birdseed but this whole area is kind of done up with the intention of the birds. Fun fact, I actually filmed a backyard tour last year during the Ditching the Split series and this is going to be a backyard tour. It is not an episode of Ditching the Split. I didn't end up posting that video. I just didn't really like how it looked and then like we got busy and obviously last summer with all the work we were doing at the front of the house it just feels like we skipped a year for being able to enjoy the backyard. A lot has grown and changed since you guys have seen it last. Roses, flagstone, flagstone we grabbed from like elsewhere on the property. We really tried to do as much of the gardening and landscaping back here as cheaply as possible because it's expensive and we have a really big yard. So flagstone was all reused even like plants we were able to pull from our front yard when we started the renovation or we brought them with us from our last home or we were able to work with Landscape Direct. A lot of these plants were from Landscape Direct. This iris was the iris that was in our front yard. A lot of people gave us a very hard time when we started that series about... A lot of people gave us a very hard time when we started the series about the plants in the front yard and thinking that we were like not going to salvage them but all of them got re-homed including the iris. Hostas we were able to split up from elsewhere in the yard and then pretty much everything else in this garden, well it's like mostly hostas. So here's another view of our little bird area, our bird hotel. We do have one of the camera bird feeders. You guys are always asking if we have one for some reason. I guess because we probably seem like the kind of people that would and we do. We haven't mounted it to the tree but it is really funny to see the raccoon come every night and like go crazy for the bird seed that's in it. Let me show you something else. This is one of my favorite views ever of the yard. I love the way that it looks with my barbie garden. This is my pink garden. You can't really tell yet because the hydrangeas haven't bloomed but everything in here fills in with pink flowers or shades of pink. So I call it my barbie garden. I also planted it like when the barbie movie was popping so I think it was followers that actually named it the barbie garden. Anyway this view is my favorite view of the yard and the you can see the vegetable garden and then the fire pit and then another garden back there. I'm going to take you guys through and I'll show you everything but starting with the barbie garden while we're here. We have strawberry vanilla hydrangeas which people ask about all the time. When these things are in bloom they are spectacular. They look so beautiful. It is a little packed in this garden but like packing a garden doesn't really concern us very much because we always end up moving stuff around anyways and like separating the plants that we can so I don't know we just like make it work. When things get too big you move them that's what Andrew said. Lavender bee balm, cone flowers, the blue spruce. Everybody loves to like you know comment about the blue spruce. It has grown so much since we put it in and obviously it's gonna get taken over like the plants around it are already taken over. Daisies etc etc so we probably will have to move the blue spruce. Also I know that the pine doesn't do great things for your garden. This isn't garden answer. This is garden question. We just adjust it as needed. I think that's like the fun part is you don't have to get it right the first time. You can kind of change your garden around and if something doesn't survive or it's struggling just move it just change it. We've got daisies. We've got lilacs. We transplanted these from elsewhere and then hydrangeas that we just planted this week. So they're kind of struggling a little bit but they'll bounce back. Same with the ninebark which is not looking so good either. This is also a beautiful dark purple lilac bush that Andrew cut down when we moved here and it has just like grown back full force and it looks incredible. I just wish that they stayed for longer. And then this historically has been my sunflower fence but I decided to not grow the sunflowers there well last year and this year because the weeds grow really bad in this particular area. Where we're standing right now is our leaching field for our septic system. So as Andrew loves to tell me we can't plant things that have deep roots. We can't do anything on our leaching field. So the grass grows like crazy here and the weeds grow like crazy here and that was kind of happening here with my sunflowers. The first year it was really good but the second year they were getting basically choked out and then I just stopped doing it all together. Also we started having an issue with like rabbits and deer finding our yard which was something that we didn't really deal with when we first moved here because it was just grass. There was nothing for them to really feast on and now because we have gardens we get a lot of wildlife activity. So anyways I just didn't do that. Instead we did planters for this year. We'll try it out and see how it works but I wanted to do it because next door they have two dogs that love to visit with our two dogs and so this is where they do the visiting. So I thought it would be better so that the dogs don't trample whatever I put in the ground when they visit their friends. I don't want to say it too loud because their windows are open but I don't think they watch our videos. We've got a lot of native things growing in this area. This is some asters and willow and daisies. Black-eyed susans are taking over. I want this whole area to fill in with so much color that you don't see how many weeds actually grow in here. It looks really good right now because we did just mulch but typically like the weeds are just crazy. Here's more of the iris that we moved. We actually took it from our front yard when we first moved in and I remember I'd never seen iris before when we moved here or maybe I had and I just like didn't know what I was looking at but I remember thinking that it looked like popcorn and wanting to like be able to see it from every window. Like I just loved looking at it so much so we were able to separate that batch from the front yard, move some to the backyard, replant a ton in the front yard and now it's ready to be separated again because iris just like keeps expanding. It keeps growing babies. We did put in some flagstone stepping stones to kind of create like a little pathway back here. It's just kind of also been covered up. We have fall sunflowers which is a native flower growing back here and Andrew specifically wanted me to show you this peony. Get a good look at that. This peony is from our old house as is the ones at the front which I'll show you shortly. Our old house, I've told this story a million times and if you're a long-time follower you already know, but our old house had a beautiful backyard with a garden that was overgrown because the owner of the house passed away and he lived alone so in old age you just couldn't care for the garden. So anyways right before we moved out we dug up the peonies because we didn't even realize they were there. The garden was so overgrown they had never bloomed. Brought them here so that we could enjoy them and this is actually the first, is this the first year that they're blooming? In five years that it's been here this one has never bloomed so this is the first time we even get to see what color the peony is. Same with our two rose of sharons. Our beautiful rose of sharons also came from our last home. They had rose of sharons on either side of the yard and we loved them so we dug them up and brought them here. They were much smaller when we first played to them so it's nice to see them growing and like enjoying the area. Our last home that we moved out of in 2020, we didn't take really an interest in gardening. Like we were kind of interested in it but we didn't know anything about it until right before we moved out. We packed up a bunch of plants from that house so that we would be able to enjoy them here and there was no shortage of plants there anyway for the next people who bought it but then it became a rental so nobody even cared about the garden anyway but that's okay. Let's keep going this way. Daisy's more black-eyed susans. Again I want this area to fill in like a beautiful chaotic garden. These bushes, this birdhouse, and this pole that it's attached to came with the house and the bushes have gotten so much bigger. The birds use that birdhouse every single year so we ended up getting a certified wildlife habitat sign for this area. This really doesn't mean anything. It's basically just bragging rights to say that you have it and I did pay extra to get it on a plaque. You can get it as a piece of paper but I wanted like the actual sign for the garden and it was a follower who suggested getting it certified as a wildlife habitat. You can go online, you just have to like fill out the questionnaire and you could get one too but it does feel like a bit of a flex to have that in the garden. These are the peonies I was just telling you about. These ones also came from the old house and again they were just like teeny tiny. They never saw the sun like this one just started blooming but they're so beautiful. Again I wish that these lasted longer too because they're just so gorgeous. This area gets a lot of the bees and the butterflies. We also get a lot of volunteer sunflowers popping up in here so it stays pretty active all summer long and then it looks beautiful in the fall too because the sedum turns red and everything starts to like, well just the sedum turns red, everything else pretty much dies. I hope you guys are enjoying our backyard tour. It feels good to be filming again. We actually had to dust off our filming equipment to do this video because we took almost a month off from filming. We took a little trip across Canada. So it's a perfect opportunity to tell you about the sponsor of today's video which is Away. Away's luggage that is designed by travelers for travelers. Every suitcase goes through rigorous testing for durability and longevity. On our across Canada trip we traveled as late as possible so we brought only our carry-ons which was super easy and convenient because of the amount of storage that fits inside of Away carry-on luggage. The smart interior compression system and the handy interior pockets made packing everything a breeze. We were even able to fit in coats and extra footwear for all of the hiking we did. Here I have the bigger carry-on in navy blue which is the hard-sided one which makes it super easy to clean and store away. Andrew also has the everywhere bag which is made of water resistant nylon. It would be a great personal bag. We didn't bring it on this trip because we were trying to travel as late as possible but unzip it show them how much room is inside. If you have stuff this is for you. And of course I traveled with the soft-sided bigger carry-on in the color clay pink. It's super cute but it's also very lightweight which made lifting it into the stowaway compartment on the airplane super easy. And if you're looking for a personal item that can fit a 16 inch laptop I recommend the featherlight crossbody bag. This is in the color brown. There's lots of other colors on the website. I highly recommend you check out Away and you can actually get 10% off your first order of Away by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code on the screen. Now back to the backyard tour. Leading into this area is the start of our vegetable garden. We expanded this area last year. Moved a bunch of plants from elsewhere and the daisies and the hostas and everything like that. Basically anything that was being covered in the other garden because as all the plants kind of grow it ends up shading other plants. So we kind of moved everything around. There's a lot happening out here right now like the squirrels are fighting. Anyway this whole area has filled in beautifully this year. It's really nice to see everything. It's really nice to see everything. I'll take a second before I forget to tell you about my solar lights. I'll link them in the but they're just an Amazon find. This one's kind of leaning but they are glass and aluminum. They're really nice. I've bought solar lights a bunch of times for this backyard. It feels like they like last a year and then they die but I just got those so I can't be a testament to how long they last but they do look really beautiful and it's a nice warm white. Moving over to my pride and joy. This is my climbing rose arbor. I love how this looks in this particular time of year. It blooms twice. It blooms in the beginning of June and then it'll bloom again in like the end of August. It is called uh hold on uh shoot I forget the name of the variety. It's a climbing rose variety that doesn't have uh sharp thorns on it so it works perfectly for an arbor and it does smell amazing. We got them in 2021 from Home Depot when they were like little tiny shrubs. Planted them in one on either side and the way that they grow every year and expand is so beautiful. You can see it from the front but from which you see from the back you know that song anyways if you see it from the front it looks beautiful but from the back it's even better. Last year was the first year that it was like really a showstopper so it was three years old by then or four years old except between you and me this rose has me a little worried. It looks a little ill. I have roses at the bottom but it's very scraggly and like not a lot of foliage on top so I am a bit worried about it. We'll see what it does this year but it's not looking good. Okay come into my vegetable garden. My handy husband built me this vegetable garden. It was one of the first things that we added to the backyard. I'd always wanted a vegetable garden. I was a gardening girly as a kid. I loved flowers and the prospects of having a vegetable garden so this is what he built me. As the sign says Sabrina's garden that's me. Andrew got that made for me as a birthday gift a couple years ago. Everything is looking a little small in here right now. I didn't end up planting everything until a little bit later in the season like it was May 2-4 weekend before I put anything even in the ground and I started everything from seed so now truthfully we were gonna replace these garden beds this year. If you guys want the plans for this garden it is on our website but we were gonna replace the garden beds. They're just made out of an untreated pine and we knew that they would rot eventually and they are but that was our budget. This was in 2021. We couldn't afford to like do anything like too fancy or too something that was gonna really last long term. Andrew says the thing is he knew they would last three to five years and we might change our mind with the layout and have to rebuild them anyways so that was okay with us. We were actually gonna replace them this year because a lot of them are rotting out and the soil inside is the soil from now two years ago so because you're like planting like it's good to move your crops around but we have like tomatoes seedlings popping up everywhere because now I've done tomatoes in pretty much every bed. Potatoes I didn't harvest in the other beds and so I didn't really want to like grow other stuff on top of that so what I did was I did a lot of sunflowers um because I hear they neutralize the soil. I don't know this isn't garden answer. We are garden. Garden could be maybe. I don't really know. I have my grandpa's garden sign. My grandpa was a big gardener as well. He had a big vegetable garden so he's passed away now but he keeps an eye on my garden and our beautiful cedars. These are all from Landscape Direct in 2022. We planted them a smidge close together which everybody loved to remind us and people were actually really mean when we first planted these saying that they're all gonna die and it was a waste of time and everything that we did wrong but these cedars grew to be incredible. They obviously they are close together but they filled in as a hedge and that's the way we wanted it and then you just have to maintain it so Andrew can share them back when they get to be too big. They have grown over a foot and I actually really do wish that we planted these all the way down the fence but we didn't so. So anyways back to what we have growing in here. A bunch of cucumbers. I well I didn't do it last year because of the June split but I do enjoy making pickles. I've got cucumbers growing in order to make pickles, lots of zinnias, carrots, beans, sunflowers because this was another like throwaway bed, um arugula, tomatoes, basil that's wilted, more sunflowers behind you. These are a bunch of varieties that I plan to cut but again as you can see I had left potatoes in there far too long so I didn't really want to plant something else on top of these rotting potatoes so sunflowers were the best option. Here's another view of my climbing roses. Again this side looks incredible. It fills in more every single day and I'll probably be able to share a video on it in maybe two days. It looks gorgeous especially when they start dropping their petals because the ground all around here just becomes pink. This side is not looking so good. I'll give it a little more time and see how it does but I am a little nervous about it. In the front of our vegetable garden this was another area I absolutely love to look at. We took apart our deck, our cedar deck, a couple years ago and we were able to reuse the planks from it to create a cute little pathway. It needs a new coat of stain but it still does the trick and it looks really cute and funny enough the dogs love running across it. I think they love the sound of their like feet to be tapping across it. You guys are always asking about being dog owners and having gardens and how do you guys manage keeping the dogs out of the gardens and we really don't. They kind of go everywhere they want but we have found that it is helpful if you create pathways like a clear pathway for them to walk they're more likely to lead through there instead of stepping on everything. We have lost quite a few plants to the dogs like stepping on them or laying on them or peeing on them but you could try putting in pathways and seeing if it works for you. This one definitely works for us and same with the one in the other garden with the flagstone although it's filled in a lot. We just recently as of this week planted up this section because it stayed pretty bare. I think I would have like sunflowers and stuff growing in the past year in this area but it stayed relatively bare. The sunflower solar light is from Costco a couple years ago it's broken now. Even like this tree has grown so much since we moved here that it casts way more shade on the area than when we initially started planting so we have been able to swap out some stuff that we previously had growing here like I moved some cone flowers into a new full sun location. Meanwhile this area stays shaded so I could like move in some heuchera and hostas and all that kind of stuff. Andrew says he loves this pathway. Here's another view of the side of our vegetable garden. The first year I think I did pumpkins along here and then I ended up doing something a little more permanent. We have blackberries and raspberries growing here. We did have blueberries and they were swallowed up by the blackberries. Don't be like us if you're gonna plant berries plant them somewhere where they can spread and be you know wild. They have filled in this area so much so that they're growing in between the cedars. We're plucking them out of the vegetable garden like the raspberries specifically end up everywhere but it's such a great problem to have. Who doesn't love raspberries? This chair I don't think is staying here. I do want to do okay my vision for this area is to do it as a little patio one day because I love the way that it's kind of like filled in on all angles so I put a chair here as a temporary solution because I wanted to see what the view looked like if you sat here and it looks really good so I think we might do it. Andrew planted up this garden this is his little baby he's got some hydrangeas in here and then really tall I think it's the Niagara Falls fountain grass no what is it okay you want to tell them about this section tell them. This is apparently my section so it's my turn to speak. We have the two bobo hydrangeas here still be and then I think it's five grasses that get about six to seven feet tall at the back along the fence which adds some privacy in the fall the tassels actually go like a light pink like really like powdery looking so that's really nice and then if you come over this way should I tell them we cut a tree down in the front for the renovation yeah okay. It's funny no not a single person noticed during ditching the split that two trees went missing out front during the renovation they were there was two pine trees that were leaning towards the house and the halfway up the one the tree actually split I guess it had broken years ago and so there was two leaders and it was leaning ready to split again we didn't want to risk them falling on the house so we had them cut down and the guy who did it I guess he assumed that we had kids because he came over to me at the end and he's like hey I made you a table stools and cups I'm like what does that mean so he showed me this it's like basically a play set for kids it's got your three stools your table bottom and your table top and then these three little pieces that are supposed to look like cups so like it's like a play set almost which we just put it out now because I tidied up everything and I think it looks pretty cool here this is another garden that I kind of did when we first moved in I carved this all out and we had so many hostas that I split them up and just did a border of hostas and this is pretty much the only garden that we put in at the beginning that we haven't really changed much about we added some ferns and lilies and small tulips and stuff like that but other than that the hostas have just kind of stayed where they are and then some of the lilies I spread out in the back and those are lilies that don't spread they kind of just I don't know what the name of them are but some lilies spread and take over these ones just stay and they grow a little bit each year but yeah they're not out of control so and this is our pride and joy the fire pit everyone seems to love this project and we love it as well it has been here for four years and it's seen a lot of change surprisingly originally we didn't have much seating at all we just had a couple broken Muskoka chairs that we got for free so we decided to add this bench here which is super great there's no back to it which I love because then you can still see through it and if you're sitting down you can see back into the rest of the yard and it's a nice that it goes all the way around because we honestly use it as kind of a table as well the landscaping around it has changed like crazy we've tried emerald cedars several times ackley peas all over them and then finally there was two that were really starting to grow well and then the deer apparently love emerald cedars and you can see this one the middle is kind of hollowed out this side's even worse but they completely ate three of them so far so I don't think we're going to end up replacing them with another one hanging egg chairs with the pergola that's people are a big fan of that too we really enjoy spending time there and if you do want to build this yourself or recreate it our plans are for sale on our website so you can check that out do you want to take over so let me just fix this cushion that is the one thing is that these cushions kind of always end up wherever they want so yes like andrew was saying this fire pit has seen some changes over the years we did cut down a tree in the backyard in like 2022 maybe I don't even really remember but they do make nice side tables so if you're looking for some side tables you should check facebook marketplace or if you have a dead tree this tree was dead we cut down a dead tree in our backyard a couple years ago and we turned it into side tables fire bowl insert is from brio and it's a smokeless fire pit this is supposed to sit up flush with it but we never we just haven't got around to like actually leveling it out properly so it's sunken in like this ring should be up and we know that so it doesn't actually look how it's supposed to look but the smokeless fire pit is so great we actually used it last night and this particular design has the mount so that you can cook on your fire pit so you can get this attachment that like comes up and we've done nachos you can also like cook meat or whatever else you like to barbecue over your fire with this uh set and there's also a pizza oven attachment so we have that as well and i'll show you guys later on you could put the pizza oven attachment on your fire pit and then cook your fire right wait cook your pizza right on the fire pit which is really cool all of the pavers for this project were a facebook marketplace find the pea gravel we bought it in bulk from a local landscape company and had them deliver it uh i think that's what people ask about the most the swings are from amazon these are solar lights we got ours at canadian tire but you can get yours like pretty much anywhere by now sell solar lights remember when we found those i felt like it was like groundbreaking to find solar lights that look like that but now everybody sells them that looks like that so it shouldn't be too hard these lights are the govi string lights which are really really awesome you can do color changing features through your phone they have an app and uh they're waterproof they've worked great we've had them for several years and then they are plugged into costco string lights which are the string lights that run the entire length of our yard we did that because lighting at night just makes everything look better but also because we let our dogs out in the evening and at night and like we've said in this video we get a lot of wildlife in the yard so it's nice to be able to light it up and those do really cast a lot of light and they're a really good quality string light here's another angle of the fire pit from the back like andrew said we did lose a cedar we had them balanced down on both sides but the deer just loved them so much that they weren't worth salvaging and replacing again one of my favorite parts of the fire pit though is my feet pavers which when i put the feet pavers in a couple years ago a lot of people did not like them they thought it was really weird to have feet pavers but i found them on facebook marketplace and i wanted them because my grandma had feet pavers leading into her garden who has also since passed away but as soon as i saw them they reminded me of her so i put them here and then i also bought a set for my mom so she has feet pavers in her yard and now my sister also has feet pavers in her yard so we're just a foot family this is also another incredible view of the yard especially at night seeing it all lit up you get the fire pit up close and then you can see the vegetable garden behind that and then the house behind that when it's all lit up it just looks so stunning this is one of the newest gardens in our backyard this was another 2023 project with landscape direct so all of the plants we put in i think most of them survived we did lose a couple in this middle section here and i think our lavender is kind of struggling back here but other than that it's really beautiful it's very low maintenance and there's a big bumblebee already enjoying some of the plants so we have back here so this will fill in with some nice color i think we want with a blue and purple color scheme for back here maybe i tried to like group my gardens based on coloring so i have like the pink garden and then i think that this is blue and purple this area we carved it out last year to do red sunflowers in it and we fenced it all off to keep the dogs out and to keep i think it was just dogs was really all that i was like trying to keep out of it i didn't want them stepping on it and then rabbits got in and ate all the seedlings so i didn't actually get any sunflowers out of it last year and then it stayed empty as dirt it pretty much filled in with weeds grass cutting when we would cut the lawn and we just abandoned this project until now so yesterday we picked up a bunch of lavender plants and we're gonna do a lavender patch the whole way i just didn't get enough lavender yet i still have to like finish it on this side the idea is that the lavender because it's uh drought tolerant and deer resistant because i don't think i'm gonna water back here very much just knowing myself that this will grow and it'll be a usable space i guess because i can harvest the lavender i did see a couple years ago a woman on tiktok posted this video where she was saying how she grows lavender in her yard every single year tons of lavender plants because she harvests them and then she was saying how she sells them or she gifts them to people so that's kind of my plan for this area and i'm looking forward to it aren't you little girl do you have anything you want to say i'm already having a weed problem back here this big hairy weed he pops up everywhere doesn't he oh we across the back of our yard we have our peak products dig free fence this was the fencing i used for the pumpkin patch i know it doesn't look that great especially the way that we have it installed it's like all kind of wonky but it keeps the dogs contained so that's the most important thing for us the deer can jump this obviously everybody who sees this fence is like well no duh obviously you have a deer problem look at the size of your fence but it's a temporary solution okay and we just keep the dogs it's to keep the dogs safe so that we can like let them out here and we don't have to watch their every move and plus our property backs onto the forest so i want to make sure the dogs don't take off running you know i'm gonna take you guys this way to treehouse trail this is more of our backyard our property sits on just under two acres so obviously we use the bulk of it for our gardens but there's a lot of it that because it's so overgrown it's hard to use the space also um it was a dumping ground for garbage before we moved in so that was really fun to clean up and we worked very hard on getting it to be a safe and clean space um but one of the things we did back here was build a treehouse so i'm gonna take you guys back and you can check it out for yourself we added in some steps that lead down to our treehouse it does always freak me out doing this little walk down here though because we have so many animals you can just hear them like running all around it's really fun in the winter because the view is totally clear so you can see all the deer that pass through here what else have we had walk through here there's coyotes back here there's a groundhog that lives like underneath our treehouse anyways this is a very beautiful fun space and uh it's nice that we get to enjoy it and use it as part of our yard because we pay for it so i saw a video a couple years ago from a woman who was like if i buy a house i'm gonna sit in every corner of that house because i own it i'm gonna sit and i'm gonna enjoy it and that's exactly what we do too is you put so much money into buying a home you better use every square inch of that home every square foot in your place you paid for what are you doing just working in one corner of your house no be proud walk around you know yeah this is about two dollars yeah yeah this is about four dollars just hang out at six dollars in fact when was the last time you touched your ceiling here's our treehouse it is fastened to a tree on the other side which you can see with treehouse attachment bolts in order to build it we went through the whole treehouse building process there's uh i think it was like treehouse building.com or something like that where we got all of the tools here andrew explain it we did a lot of research before we started this project to make sure that what we were doing is correct and we weren't going to kill the tree or ourselves if it collapsed so what we did is we found a website that actually engineers and builds treehouse attachment bolts and all the brackets and mechanisms that you need to do it safely so we went with the design of a one tree and two post treehouse because there's just not enough large trees close together to be able to span the beams to the trees to make it fully suspended in the air so we built a tri-beam against the one tree which basically is just a big triangle with two bolts that go into the tree at the top and bottom and that acts as a beam your joists sit on that and come out away from the tree then you we have two posts in the front that are on small like helical piles with a beam on top of that and then that's basically gave us our shape and then for our deck we just did deck blocks because it doesn't matter like there's no reason why we did it we just did deck we built it after so we'll give you guys a little view inside the treehouse wait where's my i need the key it's stuck in my pants this treehouse is considered off-grid there's no electricity or anything run to it the square footage is under the amount that is required for a permit um so and we own it and it's ours and so we can do whatever we want so going off of the fact that it's off-grid this is a solar motion sensor light i think it's actually broken i think i need to replace it we keep the decor pretty minimal down here we haven't really done or changed the treehouse that much because it just fills in with leaves anyway the trees are always dropping leaves obviously this deck is filthy because of the amount of fallen leaves that have accumulated over the years i added my cute little bell to it when we first built it this was an etsy find i bought it from somebody in like indonesia and we did add bird decals a couple years ago as well that we bought from like a random craft sale the treehouse stays locked at all times so don't even think about coming to see it let's go inside welcome to our treehouse you guys can't smell it but it smells amazing in here and i don't know why it always smells so good in here we have artwork on the walls that a follower did for us she drew aspen and ackley our dogs she also did a sketch of the treehouse so we have that hanging in here a lot of the decor and stuff in here was thrifted we tried to keep it pretty inexpensive of a build we did a shiplap a pine shiplap wall in here this giant beautiful window was a facebook marketplace find i think it was like 250 for this gorgeous window this window was another facebook marketplace find uh for look for 50 and the window on the very front of the treehouse which andrew will show you right now was actually our old bedroom window so when we put in our sliding door in our bedroom we use this window for the treehouse so a lot of it is repurposed material even the tree branch chandelier is a literal tree branch i picked out a tree branch from the forest back here spray painted it and then added crystal details from amazon and then battery operated twinkle lights that can be used to turn on and off through a remote the one side has broken so i haven't replaced the twinkle lights on the one side but these twinkle lights are connected all throughout the treehouse so you can't see because it's daylight all of the lighting in here is controlled through the remote and because we don't have electricity the sconces above the bed are actually the light bulbs that are considered emergency light bulbs so you can use them as a flashlight or as a light bulb and you just charge them by using them in an actual lamp that plugs in for electricity you can charge your bulbs that way even like the built-in around here is very very basic it's just plywood even with unfinished edges it's nothing fancy but we do keep board games in this top section and we have a loft on the top that has another mattress so technically it could sleep like three like you could put two people in this bed one up top andrew and i used to do treehouse night every tuesday night and then we got a little busy with ditching the split so we haven't done our treehouse nights in a while but i'm hoping that we get to start doing them again because they are really fun and special we do one soon if you guys are interested in seeing more of this project we didn't ever make plans for it but i do have a whole video that documents the entire build process i forget how long it took because we did it over the span of a winter however if you're interested in seeing that video it's really an interesting fun one to watch also because we're attached to a tree the treehouse does rock and shift you can hear the treehouse moving and it blows in the wind on a really windy day you can actually feel like the whole thing going like this that doesn't bother us though that is just part of the process we stayed in a treehouse spent breakfast one time actually it was much higher up in our treehouse and the whole thing was moving like this every time it would get windy and they had to give the disclaimer that it's going to move because you're fastened to a giant well theirs was a pole basically ours is a tree anyway i think i've said enough i should get going these are our tempo run stairs it feels like you know it's really funny as one time i had um well i worked in a retirement home so i had one of my residents come see the treehouse for some reason old people love the treehouse they're all very excited about the treehouse but i i brought my dear resident and her bestie to come see the treehouse her bestie who was like almost 90 years old went all the way down the stairs and then all the way back up and we're like winded every time we do it she did it like such a pro here's another view of the yard obviously a lot of grass and green space our goal is to landscape this whole yard have tons of gardens and make it really beautiful and lush we do plan to keep the middle section clear though because aspen is our little frisbee catcher so she'll need her runway in order to catch her frisbee but everything else we would love to add tons of color and foliage and make it really rbg worthy royal botanical gardens as we move into the conclusion of this backyard tour like i said we're going to skip the whole other side of the yard we have our greenhouse over there but something exciting is coming so i don't want to show you it just yet you guys are always asking what the next series is and i can confirm that it is coming we're going to do a backyard tour which you guys are watching right now we'll do a home tour so you can see inside and then we'll be starting our next series so make sure you stay tuned for that welcome to our pool everybody this was the pool that we restored in 2021 formally there was a wooden deck on top of it and so it filled with rainwater leaves animals like things would fall into the pool and get trapped and then they couldn't get out it's really awful if you think about it so in 2021 we took the deck off of it we weren't really sure what we were going to find underneath and the state of the pool we wouldn't know if it was salvageable until we started cleaning it out and looking at the frame of it and thankfully the liner had decayed but the pool itself was salvageable so we fixed up the perimeter of it neither of us had a pool growing up or really knew anything about pools but andrew put hours of research into this project to figure out how to restore a swimming pool my mom has a pool so we asked her for advice we asked other people who have pools for their advice we contacted pool companies to try and get them to save the pool for us and nobody responded to our emails it was also during the height of covid when people were really putting a lot of work into their backyards and making their home a vacation space so it makes sense that we didn't hear back from anybody and it worked out in our favor because this became our most popular project it received i think over 100 million views on youtube it was really what kick-started our youtube channel was this pool and that didn't even happen until like a year or two after we restored the pool suddenly that video really took off of us documenting the whole process and now now here you are watching us on youtube so this was the project that started it all we're definitely looking forward to using the pool more than we did last year with ditching the split andrew says that he used the pool three times he only swam in it three times and that's really not a lot for an entire summer when you have a swimming pool and you're paying to run a heater and the maintenance involved with keeping your pool open so we are going to make time to swim this year we've already swam twice so we're doing well we did a stamped concrete around our pool which we have a love-hate relationship with we were worried that we didn't order enough stamped concrete which is why it's so short and then we had to do lava rock to fill the space it's just limiting where you can put patio furniture in that case because you can't really fit any chairs along this side and you're not gonna like sit in the gravel and stamped concrete gets really hot you have to seal it so it gets slippery we actually just sealed it and it looks a lot better than it did um but anyways we just have a love-hate relationship with stamped concrete this covered porch area is a work in progress i didn't put too much effort into decorating it's gonna i just don't care that much this used to be a mud room the last owner built it out of doors very big on using recycled materials which is great um and it came apart very easily in that case so we took down all the doors turned it into an open covered porch area and it's been great for entertaining to have this space this leads into one of the garages and yeah we honestly we haven't even really done much over here because last summer we just didn't have the time to even really host anything i think i hosted father's day and that's like pretty much it just to finish off this video we have our dining area underneath this area is also going to be experiencing some changes because we're going to be moving our dining table up top and make the seating area down below because our kitchen like just having the kitchen right off of the patio door there it kind of makes sense that if you're going to be cooking food and then eating outside to eat up top and then lounging by the pool this entire patio set is from pioneer pools andrew picked out these chairs because they do recline and he is an old man yeah they actually are really great chairs we also needed something that would be heavy and not blow away because of the wind that we get through here this was before we built this fence but oh yeah our old dining chairs ended up in the pool like four times so we had to invest in some heavy duty patio furniture this table is also really amazing as well because we have it extended to its full size right now but it collapses in and you can have it smaller this is our hot tub um we love having a hot tub i feel like if you're in canada a hot tub is better to have even than a pool we use this all year long and we bought it on clearance our pool store was having a hot tub clearance sale and this was the floor model so we were able to save quite a bit of money by buying the floor model it definitely needs a clean and some water however we have got our money's worth out of this hot tub because we use it so often we built the fence in 2023 it was formally chain link and we decided to close it in make it a little private not that we have anything to hide okay we don't have anything to hide it's just like our hot tubs right there and we were going to be in our bathing suit so it's just kind of like less awkward for everybody andrew just built these planters if you guys want to watch the video of how he built them he filmed and edited a youtube video all by himself it's on his channel make sure you give it some love he's very proud of it and we painted it um swiss coffee by bear the fence is stained cedar also by bear and this video is going to be coming out because it was part of an ad we did with the brand so when you guys see that video comment oh my god i love your planters on that video and i'll know that you were from youtube i think this will probably be one of the last things i show you we built an outdoor pool table a couple years ago as part of i don't know why we got it off facebook marketplace and it was a good deal and i wanted an outdoor pool table i thought it would be cool it was before we had a dining table so i imagined that we could put a cover on it make it a dining table and then take the cover off and it would be a pool table so that's exactly what we did we used it like that for the first year um except we built a cover out of cedar and it was very heavy to constantly take this cover off to use it and then you have to like find somewhere to store it we always do this where we like have a great idea and we start executing it and then there's like always one little thing that's like okay we'll come back to it and do it later and then we don't come back to it so anyways we were left with this giant cedar top that you might have seen it in the videos don't show them because it looks really bad it's like floating around our backyard um that you always had to move if you wanted to play pool so we've just kind of got it under our covered area right now we love playing pool i'm not very good at it but i still do love it and obviously this isn't a full-size pool table but when people come over they do enjoy playing it as well except last year last year we didn't even take the cover off at once because one we were really busy with the renovation but two we were worried that squirrels had made a nest inside of it or mice hadn't made a nest inside of it because we thought we'd heard something so we just didn't even open it so last year we didn't even use it at all and that seems to be a reoccurring trend throughout this whole video is that like last year we were just so busy with the reno that i feel like we didn't even really use our backyard and so that's not happening this year we're gonna make time to use our backyard we're gonna go swimming we're gonna use the amenities because we've paid for it so we may as well use them oh yeah we have an outdoor dartboard too outdoor dartboard we also did this a couple years ago this is just a bulletin board like a cork bulletin board that we spray painted black added a frame around it out of the dart board mounted it on a fence post and then stuck it in some concrete in the planter with drainage holes and this is also really fun when people come over they love the outdoor dartboard again we didn't even use that last year either so this will be the year though it was falling over it actually was falling over all summer long thank you guys so much for watching today's video i hope you guys have enjoyed the backyard tour it's really fun for us to get to show you where all of our hard work was going prior to ditching the split so peaceful i know you guys love seeing renovation stuff and we we love doing that as well but gardening in the backyard projects is really what has our heart so we're happy to show it off and hopefully you can use this as some inspiration for your own home or your future home if i missed where anything is from or if you guys have any other questions you can leave them in the comments but i am happy to report that we are back to our sunday videos this was a nice one to kind of ease back into it and we will be starting our next series in two weeks so make sure you stay tuned for that and anything else we need to tell the people you want to say bye honey okay thank you guys for watching and we're going to see you guys next sunday for another new video bye