Our Tolerable Landscaping

Last year, our only focus was the inside of the house. Every wall has been painted. Every piece of brass has been removed and replaced. The floors have been refinished. The list goes on. The one area that hadn't been touched, up until a couple weeks ago, was the landscaping. Apparently the person before us hadn't done anything with it, so that meant 4 years of an unkempt yard. People knew they were at our house because we had "the bushes that were half way over the sidewalk." Seriously, they were. The trees were overgrown as well and there was a hodgepodge of bushes scattered through the front area.

Here is the only before we have :(


Here I've added captions so you can try to see the overgrown areas:



We really just weren't ready to tackle it until this year, and wow- what a time consuming project! It definitely isn't done, but it is tolerable now. We can see the entire sidewalk, YAY! The weather was just too good today to not spend it outside, so we put our final 4 hours in and finished it up. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures along the way, so the only one I have is from today. Notice those huge rocks in front of the large tree aren't even visible in the before picture.




So what did we do?
*Tore out the 4 VERY overgrown bushes in the section next to the garage
*Tore out probably 3 more random bushes on the opposite side
*Cleaned up the roots from the tree on the left of the photo (you can't see how much was done from the photos...but just trust me on this one! It was growing OVER the edging.)
*Cleaned up the trees (Again, you can't tell because our before photo has leaves, but they were dangerously close to the house and there were many dead sections)
*Raked and added new soil to the entire area to even it out
*Planted 4 Hosta bushes
*Planted 2 Rhododendrons
*Laid new black mulch
*Added two pots with some lovely pansies and tulips to the porch
*Poured a new concrete step up to the porch. When we moved here, there was only the bottom step. It was quite a jump to get up there, much better now.







The mulch looks like it's different colors but it's not, some was dry and some was wet.



I can't wait until the trees have leaves, especially the Japanese Maple on the right. The bushes up near the house are burning bushes and look amazing in the Fall, but I'm just excited to see some green on them soon!

So what is left to do? Really, this list is way too long to type out, but we need to help the grass quite a bit. We also have more cleanup, but for this year, the mulched area is done. We will level it out more and add a small retaining wall next year....yup it has to wait. But don't worry, we haven't even started on the backyard yet, and this time I will remember to take the before shots!