When we bought our house we inherited a jungle. The owner of the home had about 4 or 5 five other houses, so he was only here around 5 or 6 times a year and he didn't maintain the yard. Because we live in the hill country we have the unique advantage of having a house that sits below the street (we live on the side of a hill). As you can imagine this creates tons of drainage issues (something I wasn't aware of until I began "cleaning up" the front yard).