Operation: I'd Like to Enjoy My Patio This Summer

[Husband] and I live in a very nice three-story town house in a part of [home-town] that we just love. One of my favorite features of our home is the patio that the previous owner (aka [Husband]'s sister) had installed. It's a brick paver* patio that's nicely shaded by three big pines and has room for about 6 chairs and our ENORMOUS grill. We used to eat dinner out there all the time, but the mosquitoes started getting really bad a few summers ago and the landscaping off the edge of the patio was honestly a little depressing. Hence, we  stopped using it as much.

Last weekend I decided I would no longer be defeated by mosquitoes, or bad landscaping or the giant climbing vines that threatened to take over the fence beyond the patio. I bought a pair of $1.97 work gloves from Home Depot, got out the clippers and some trash bags and proceeded to tear up the 12x4 patch of despair on the edge of the patio.

I don't have a real before picture, but this is what it looked like after about 3 hours of ripping stuff up.

This is admittedly not terrible, but it's not great I can't begin to describe to you how gross and messy it was before, but maybe this will  help:

•  We pulled up enough weeds, branches, vines and other various plant matter to entirely fill our 64-gallon trashcan.  Fortunately, one of our neighbors is on vacation and another house on our street is bank-owned (ie vacant)...oh yeah, that's 64x3.
• We unearthed 6 cinder blocks, 8 decorative concrete bricks, 6 regular bricks, and  few other various pieces of concrete, and 8 GIANT nails that the workmen who installed the patio left behind.  I hope the patio was paid for via flat fee and not by materials. That was at least $15 worth of metal.
• Some of the climbing vines we cut and then pulled down out of the pine trees were (no kidding!) 30 feet long.

We couldn't even get it all, so [Husband] had to venture into the no man's land between our fence and the back neighbors brick wall to cut some the crazy weeds and vines that had worked their way all around the fence boards and our trees. 

Much, much better, but even at this point there's a ways to go.



The other problem, besides poor landscaping, is the mosquitoes! They are relentless! The house behind us isn't in the best shape (actually we affectionately call that whole street behind ours The Street of Despair) so we're pretty sure there must be standing water or something else over there that's causing the critters to multiply by the millions. So what to do about that?

TO BE CONTINUED...(how mysterious and exciting...not really).


*why yes, I DID just learn this word from Young House Love.