Home Landscaping Project

When we first saw this house, we liked it; but it was missing one major thing:  landscaping!  The huge yard was filled with trees, but the ground along the house was completely bare.

This project has moved in phases that began in the spring.  The first project was to knock down the fenced-in area next to the garage.  It's super helpful when your neighbor owns just about every tool, large and small.


This pen was put in place as a dog run for those who lived here previously.  Since we don't have a dog, this was just wasted space for us.  And kind of an eyesore.  We didn't take a before picture of this area, but it can be seen in this photo from our Easter egg hunt.  


Once the fence was down, some dirt was brought in so that we could plant some grass.


Graydon got to ride along.


Child labor!  It's already looking so much better - and much more open.




We bought some pavers to create a little garden area and some hydrangeas to fill it up.


He finished after the sun went down.


A few weeks later when the grass started to grow in.


With the side of the house done, we turned our attention towards the bigger project: the front!  It doesn't look bad. . . just kind of plain and unfinished.


We put some pavers down to create the garden space but hit a roadblock that kept us from planting for a long while: the gutters.  Whenever it would rain, instead of going down and out the gutters, the rain would just fall off the edge.


And that created a huge puddle of water on both sides of the porch.




We can't plant anything in those conditions!

We thought that the gutters needed to be cleaned out.  But that wasn't the case.  There was, however, an obstruction in the drainage areas that needed to be fixed.

Once that was finished, Andy began the job of trenching and adding tile (piping) to the bottom of the gutters so that it could all go underground and drain out further down in the yard.  I didn't get any photos of that process; but it was a lot of work for my dear hubby.  But now that it's complete, we don't have any huge puddles by the porch and there is no piping to step over.  With that part finished, we could finally start planting - about four months after this whole project started.

This is sort of a before picture of the front.  We added the pavers, though they are not in their final spot in this photo.

After:  Andy planted some mums in front of the porch.


Before

After: In addition to the mums in front, Andy planted two varieties of boxwoods, some drawf burning bushes, and rhododendruns.


Before:

After

Since our house is so wide, it's hard to get a good "After" photo of the whole thing.  I had to stand pretty far back, making difficult to see all that was planted.  But once it all starts growing, it's going to look great!


We're still going to fill in some of the spaces with Hostas.  But that may not get done this year.  And eventually, we'd like to create some sort of a path that leads from the driveway all the way around to the front door.  But for now, we are very happy with the progress that's been made.

In other news, we celebrated our 13th Anniversary last week!  The kids spent the night at their cousins' house and we enjoyed a nice dinner out.

And this is just a random: I looked into the living room one Saturday afternoon and overheard Graydon talking to his Ferb about how they could watch "Wreck-It Ralph" together.  I thought that was so cute.

 

In about 38 hours, we'll be on our way to Disney World!  When we come back, I'm going to have TONS of photos to share!