Landscape Design

Well, I have worked long and hard on these, and I'm finally done with the landscape designs for our yard (I'm sure there will be changes we will need to make to these plans along the way, but I got everything into the plans that I could think of for now, so that feels nice to be "finished" with them).  Since we have to submit our plans to the HOA for approval, we decided to include all the possible landscaping ideas we have in this plan and get it approved.  And then we know we won't be able to include all of these items in our landscaping job right now, but the plan is that we will already have the HOA approval for everything, so we can just choose which items we can fit into our budget for now, and which things we will save for the future.  After spending so much time working on these plans, I am really excited to have the job started.  We just need to get the HOA approval and meet with the landscaper once or twice more to make some final decisions on the budget and which parts of the plan we can include right now, and I'm hoping that the job should get started within a month or so.  The HOA requires that you submit your plans within 4 months of moving in (and I can't believe we've already lived in our house for 6 months now!), and that you finish the back yard within 1 year.  I know we're already behind on the date for submitting our plans (life happened, oh well), so we'll see how long things take before the job will be completed.  I'm a bit nervous about the possibility that these heavy El Nino rains we've been hearing about could cause some pretty lengthy delays in the timing of this job, but I'm allowing myself to just go with it and not worry about it.  (I just hope that there's some chance we could at least get in part of the yard before heavy rains start, only because heavy rains + dirt yard = muddy dog paw prints in the house, so I'm not looking forward to that).  But I do realize that before too long we will be looking back on all this, enjoying our yard, and realizing that the dirt and mud we dealt with weren't really a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  At least that's what I'll try to focus on when the rain starts.  :)