Under Construction

We have been working slowly on getting our front yard cleaned up and ready to put sod in the front yard. I have ripped out many rose bushes and have been moving rocks. Tim and I have different ideas of how the yard should look like. We put down some redwood bark on top of the grass/weeds that I killed and we roto-tilled it in. A few weekends later we redid all the sprinklers.
Before picture: We are planning on putting sod in October. Hoping for a nice "after" picture in a few months.
Last September we had a pipe break in our back yard. We had it capped off. The same weekend we did the sprinklers we decided to re-build the pipe that was broken. After Tim fixed it by himself (and only making 5 trips to Home Depot, including sprinkler parts). It was fixed and we had running water again in the back yard. But I could hear running water but couldn't see any coming out anywhere. And dark spots started showing up on our dining room wall. At first I thought the kids had smeared chocolate syrup on the wall but I cleaned it up and the next day there were more spots. So I called a plumber and he came out and found that this piece (picture below) had broken and was leaking water (most likely when Tim was tightening everything for the new pipe.)
The water had been leaking for 4 days. So the plumber fixed the broken pipe and left a hole in the wall.
So I started ripping out the rest of the wall where the water damage was. I am hoping we can get the wall fixed this weekend with new sheetrock. This is what our dining area had looked like for the last week:


AND I forgot to add that our new dishwasher kept filling up with water again. (3rd time it has happened.) And I was tired of not having clean dishes when you opened it up after the cycle was over. So we ended up getting a dishwasher from the McKissicks, who had recently moved and couldn't use theirs anymore. Tim replaced the old one with the new one (with a little help from Ted Ballin.) And it works perfect! We are quickly becoming good DIY's.