Thursday, December 18, 2014

High Impact...Hidden in the Shadows

The front yard landscaping is the only project we have successfully completed in this house! The former owners pretty much phoned it in while they lived here and the front yard suffered like the rest of the house.  99% of our front yard is concrete.  We live on a street that starts to curve as you get to our house so we have our driveway and a second way onto our lot that makes it like a circle driveway.  It is ugly as can be but it has been great for extra parking and safety since our street can be dicey sometimes with people flying around the corner.


Unfortunately we don't have any full shots of the landscaping - I am going to make sure we have good "before" photos next project we start.  Everything in the beds was overgrown or dead so it looked like we were living it up with no HOA to hound us about aesthetics.  I cringed every time I drove up!  We were "those neighbors" that we hate living around.  In the summer the sun was beating down on the front of the house in the afternoon so we waited until October to plant some new landscaping.  We didn't want everything to incinerate in the heat.  Our house faces north/south and our last house did as well so we thought it would get some sun.


We tore out everything in the beds and scraped the soil/mulch (yay that was easy) and also were eyeing this random brick wall that was in front of the bed.  The bed is flush with the foundation and driveway and the way the bricks were laid, you could only plant large shrubs and no flowers because you wouldn't be able to see them.  After we ripped the plants out we were brainstorming about what to do and we noticed the bricks were wobbly.  I used my kung fu skills and kicked them...to our surprise, they fell right over.  HAPPY TIMES!  Whoever built that mess did NOT mortar them to the driveway so out they all came.  It was already looking better.  Again, no one will take bricks/rocks so while we step up the dumpster hunt, they are in M's old truck bed.  Once that was done we headed over to the nursery to make our vision of gorgeousness a reality.



We needed soil and plants so we selected our bounty and off to the register we went where we were punched in the face by the ridiculous price tag of the nursery items.  I like to support local businesses but we are on a budget since we have to renovate EVERYTHING on this house.  We will probably stick to a big box store next time - especially for soil.  When we were planting, there is a flood sprinkler system that is in the beds and I managed to hit a line so we had to replace a piece.  It is dead center where we wanted the plants and pretty shallow so it was tough navigating around it.

A few weeks later we noticed that the sun's new angle for winter/fall stops just short of hitting the front of our house with sun...so our plants have never seen the sun.  Surprisingly they haven't died but we did get a freeze and they were hurting.  Some never really bounced back 100% so I'm trying to watch the weather because they don't have the advantage of warming up with sunlight.  Lately it's been warmer and our pansies are flowering so for everything hiding in the shadows...it looks MUCH better!




No comments:

Post a Comment