Driveway (Before)

A few weeks ago, Dan met with four excavation contractors to get some quotes on taking out a few trees on our property, extending the driveway and fixing the french drain. The day before we left for vacation, we hired one of those contractors to do the work for us. The evening before we left for vacation, I spent some time taking these pictures, knowing that our lawn would look different by the time we got home.

The retaining wall on the side of our driveway is original to the house (over 35 years old) and is definitely showing its age.

The french drain issue has left our back yard quite soggy, even in the summer, and turned the top of our driveway into a slick, icy mess from December through March.
Our goal with extending the driveway is to give the kids a place to ride bikes and maybe someday play basketball. (The boys have never even had tricycles because there hasn't been any place to ride them at our house.) So the contractor agree to take out the four main trees that are left of the Japanese Maple (in the picture below) in the week that we were gone. He also told us that he may have to take out the fifth one as well (the one closest to the house in this picture), but would try to save it if they didn't run into too many roots while digging out the dirt. (It's one of the two maples on our lawn, and those are the only trees I really like.) The driveway is being extended 18 feet away from house, parallel with the garage. All the dirt that is being removed from the area where the wall is now is being relocated to the front lawn to make it less steep.
On the front lawn, he agreed to pull out this huge bush and replace the nearly-dead sapling with the Japanese Maple that they would be digging up from the back yard.
Although we didn't think about it too much while we were on vacation, it was exciting to remember that work was being done while we were gone!