The Design

Some people see the statue in the block of marble, the picture on the blank canvas, the instructions in the box of IKEA furniture. I'm not one of those people. I can barely be bothered to check if the door is actually open before I walk through it. My lack of spacial perception has lead me to make some questionable choices about what my convertible car can and cannot carry with the top down - but in my defense, all items have survived transportation!

In summary, I could not design our backyard. I had ideas, but for true direction, this required my husband, A.J. After measuring the backyard (more time was spent discussing the proper way to measure something, than actual measuring), he constructed a blank diagram of our backyard and printed out copies for us to draw on and discuss our ideas...
...And after A.J. finished his design, I looked at my blank diagram and agreed his idea was much better. Even if it did include a putting green.
After a few weeks of procrastinating we acquired an architect. After giving him our design, he came back with almost the exact same design. Just in a form that didn't look like we scrawled in on a bar napkin. 
It should be noted at this point that our back yard is a bit large for traditional "landscaping". At around a quarter of a acre and on the edge of several acres of wild land, it lends itself more to "let's just see what grows and occasionally beat it back with something sharp" approach. Given this much room, our design included everything that we've ever seen on the DIY network. Fire pit, check. Spa, check. Vegetable garden, Patio, Pergola, Spa, Lawn, Trees, CHECK! Oh, and a putting green.

Excessive you say?

The architect added to all of this a partial roman temple with pillars. Crazy has company.

After reviewing the initial design and making some minor changes, we were ready to find a contractor!

It has potential

There was no phrase uttered more often by anyone who saw our house when we first brought it. There were bits missing from the inside; there were bits missing from the outside; oh and there's no backyard.
That's not to say it didn't have a backyard - it was just missing. We had just purchased the most expensive natural rock garden in town!
And while we focused on fixing the inside bits and the outside bits of the house, our imitation viking cemetery of a backyard sat, mocking us.

Real Viking Cemetery

Our Backyard

After almost a year, most of the house was fixed. Truthfully the house has just lured us into a false sense of security by becoming our own personal example of quantum entanglement. We have discovered that our house lives in this acceptable state of simultaneously being fixed and needing something else fixed. That's right: Our house is Schrödinger's cat. If you think everything is fixed, it is merely because you haven't yet discovered the other thing that is broken yet.
Not seeing the next broken thing on the house for all of two minutes, we quickly decided to start on the backyard.