Landscaping...grrrr

So, who would have thought that to be a homeowner you either had to be able to afford to hire to have someone do lots of things for you, or you just had to be really good at...everything.  I've already taught myself to remove carpet, paint, install wainscoting, sew (kind of), make pillows, upholster a chair, build a desk, etc etc...and now you want me to learn landscaping too?

The back patio wasn't really of much concern to us for the first few months, because it was pretty much always covered in snow.  Now that it is in the 90's (in May...um hello Spring, where did you go?) I think it is time to evaluate the patio situation going on in the back.

Here are a few pictures form the walk through back in December...

The whole thing really is much lovelier in person, or maybe I am just overly optimistic.  There are some major drainage issues and some bricks that have sunk and the whole thing should probably be replaced (this is coming from me and I know nothing on this topic, so I could be totally wrong).  It would be wonderful to replace the whole thing, but obviously very expensive and difficult seeing as the patio is brick set in concrete.

My first idea was to tackle the ivy overtaking the wall...I looked into pruning ivy and maintaining it and based on that, though it might be best to really prune it back and get rid of all the crud stuck in it (lots of crud)...I pulled out so many vines that weren't attached to anything and sticks and crap and when I lifted up the ivy that was laying on the top of the wall, there was about half an inch of mud and things...lots of living things just chillin under the ivy.  If you know me, you know I am terrified of worms.  Weird, right?  Don't really care about snakes, don't mind bugs or really many other things, but worms...scare the crap out of me.  They are gross and disgusting, but in the name of a cleaner patio I threw on some rubber gloves and my big girl panties and went to town.  I was nice to the Ivy and untangled mostly all of the vines before deciding where to cut.  Lots more trimming needs to be done, but they are much cleaner and now we just need to figure out what to do with them.

Here is a picture of the ivy wall after I played Edward Scissorhands...

Pretty hard to see from the iPhone picture taken from inside, but I had just showered after being dirty all day and at that point, the patio seemed like a very dirty place to go...so I stayed indoors.  You can see a lot of the remnants of the old ivy still on the wall.  So, that needs to be painted, but for now I am kind of at a standstill.  I think we should probably evaluate the whole patio situation before we really invest too much money into anything too fancy...just in case we replace the whole thing.

So, if you have any landscaping tips...please share...I am all ears!