About - The Backyard Pros

Hey! I’m Jamie. Welcome to The Backyard Pros!

What is This Website About?

This website is about anything backyard related, but we mainly focus on lawn care, gardening, decks, exterior paints/stains, outdoor furniture, and outdoor home maintenance.

jamie CEO of The Backyard Pros in his backyard

Jamie Penney

Founder, Writer, and Chief Editor

Jamie is the founder of The Backyard Pros. He is the chief editor and writer. When he was 15 years old he started working at a Canadian Tire Garden Center helping people buy plants, gardening products, and lawn care products. He has real estate experience and he is a homeowner. Jamie loves backyard projects, mowing the lawn, gardening, refinishing furniture, and enjoys sharing his knowledge online with others.

LinkedIn.

Articles.

Our Writers

Janice Lundy

Writer

Janice is a retired High School teacher who is spending her leisure years keeping busy with all sorts of projects. Aside from freelance writing, she’s an enthusiastic amateur chef, home wine maker, and tends a large raised-bed vegetable garden, while at the same time running a Bed & Breakfast. Various DIY sewing, craft and home renovation projects are among her hobbies. You can find Janice on her own blog as well, Tales from the Vienna Woods.

Michelle Weaver

Writer

Michelle Weaver is a former pastry chef of thirty years who reinvented herself during the pandemic, now happily earning a living through freelance writing and selling her art. She and her significant other live in an 1895 farmhouse in North Carolina, where they have several acres, allowing her to garden to her heart’s content. When she’s not playing in the dirt, she enjoys hiking in the nearby mountains, creating new vegetarian recipes, and photographing the wildlife that comes to visit.

Art Website (Coming soon).
Read Articles by Michelle.

Why The Backyard Pros?

First of all, I want to help you with your backyard.

Let’s go back to where it all started, Newfoundland. During the summers as a high school student, I worked at a Canadian Tire Garden Center. It was a pretty fun summer job, I learned a lot about gardening and lawn care products that I started helping my mom in our garden at home. I remember buying some weed barrier fabric and some big bags of black mulch. I would get dirty and get to work adding plants into our garden. I found it peaceful, it was also a plus to help my mom out!

I also started mowing the lawn to help my dad, but I noticed our lawn needed some TLC. I researched and found out we had some crabgrass patches that I ended up getting rid of.

I must say, at a young age I was interested in taking care of our lawn and garden beds. It’s quite enjoyable caring for your family’s home!

After finishing school I moved out to go to university. Fast forward 4 years later I ended up with a business degree! This is when I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I was interested in Real Estate.

I got my real estate license in Halifax, NS, and worked in new home construction. I learned a lot about homes and the housing market, but what always caught my eye was the exterior designing process. In new home construction, I saw some beautiful houses, some had big swimming pools, tennis courts, hot tubs, huge lush lawns, and everything you could imagine.

I also noticed that the outdoor furniture was a major selling feature for so many clients; when a home was staged just right, and people could imagine their families in these one-of-a-kind backyards, they wanted to sign the papers with their offers.

Being a Realtor taught me so much about how the exterior of a home is such an important part of a house, more than most people even realize.

After being a Realtor, my girlfriend and I bought a newly constructed home. Instead of designing the backyard with the home designers, I had a clean slate. The backyard was dirt!

This was the time I decided I want to build a website about backyards. I am a homeowner who gets to customize my own backyard! I can answer questions people are asking, I know they are asking because I am asking them as I go.

I started hanging string lights above my deck, taking care of my new lawn, but my favorite project was the concrete pavers. The image below shows the start of the process.

You can see the concrete pavers project here that I did all by myself in my backyard in Halifax.

I have so many projects that I want to share with you so don’t forget to tag along my backyard journey!

The Backyard Pros Accomplishments

I am proud to announce that The Backyard Pros has been named as one of the top 100 lawn care blogs on the web by FeedSpot! See the list here.

More About Jamie…

So, if you are interested in learning more about me then let me quickly tell you about myself.

My name is Jamie and I enjoy doing DIY style projects. I have always been this way, I just enjoy focusing in on something and completing the job, whether it is building a deck with my dad or cleaning up the garden weeds to help my mom. Once I start, there is no stopping me!

Growing up I played a lot of sports, pretty much every sport that was offered in the small city i lived in:

hockey
baseball
soccer
basketball
volleyball
swimming
biking

I am sure there are many more sports, but these are just coming to mind. Later on as I grew a bit older hockey became my main focus, I did play some competitive hockey after high school until I decided to jump into university to get my business degree. After finishing school I started real estate! Where I learned so much about how the whole industry works.

I realized I needed a new hobby after I no longer played so many sports, and this is where my projects came back to me. I started doing home projects inside and out. Gardening to backyard landscaping, it is just so fun and I enjoy the processes.

One of my favorite hobbies is refinishing furniture, I actually have a YouTube channel where you can watch me refinish furniture from start to finish. They call me the Furniture Flippa, see my youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/FurnitureFlippa

During all the lockdowns, creating Furniture Flippa really enabled me to express my passion for DIY projects. I also know a lot about paint products, wood stains, and wood finishes, which is why I go into detail about such products and informational articles on this blog as well.

I have a full blog about my furniture flipping journey too, so feel free to check out furnitureflippa.com

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the articles I write and if you have any questions you can send me an email.