Side Yard Project - Before Pictures and the Plan

We have a weird side yard between us and our neighbors.  It's about 50/50 in our neighborhood if people put up a fence or not in this unusable space. Almost everyone has thrown river rock down in the space. A few people have built sheds, but in general the space goes unused.

The reason for these awkward side yards? The alley garage that I love splits our properties in two. I love that we don't have snout houses in our neighborhood because the garages are out of sight. I love that the alleys get people outside and talking. But the awkward side yards are a drawback. Let me show you what I'm talking about:

Anyhow. We were going to put a fence up and build a path from gate to gate last summer and call it good. But then our neighbor's house went up for sale - they'd rented it illegally (rentals are only allowed for proven hardship and for a max of two years per our HOA rules) for four years and finally got caught. (I was 100% not the nark. For real. My nark days are over).  In Denver, neighbors traditionally split the cost of fences. Fences are the norm here. And with no one next door, I didn't feel compelled to foot the entire bill.

Anyway, the house next door went up for sale, then went up listed as a short sale before going into foreclosure. B mowed the grass next door all last summer - when someone should have been mowing our grass while we were having babies and having their heads operated on. But I don't hold grudges. But I digress. In February our new neighbors moved in and they're awesome - happy hour kind of people with a little girl who has three days on Thomas and a really cool older son.  We knew things were going to be good between us when B offered to help them move boxes and our neighbor said, "That'd be great. We don't have much, my wife's a total minimalist".

So as we were talking about putting a fence in, the neighbors said "Why don't we just make it a fun hang out instead of letting it go to waste - put in a little area for the kids and a patio for us?" Mr. B was sold at the mention of a tiki bar (which I vetoed). We consulted a Realtor who advised us to keep things separate enough that we can easily have two separate spaces for resale purposes. And a neighbor and friend is a landscape architect, so he drew up the design for us last week. And it's going to be awesome.

Here's what we have to work with:

The unpainted fence is ours. That's priority #1. There will be a river rock bed with aspen trees along the property lines (in lieu of a fence). We'll build a small patio with pavers that we can remove should we need to have completely separate spaces. And at the back of the yard:

We'll have the kids area (actually two) with rubber playground mulch. We're not doing anything extravagant - Thomas's sandbox will go on our side, maybe a Fisher Price slide on the other and a sail shade over the top for shade.  We're all pretty excited about it - have I mentioned about 1,000 times how much we love our neighborhood?