The Front Yard is Done

The front of our house for a while looked like this, with the green shutters and the awkward garden bed.

Then we had the fence installed and the shutters and trim painted.

Awkward garden bed remained.

But this was the plan:

A few weeks ago we had some lovely yard folks clear out the garden bed, expand it to be parallel with the front porch, and rototiller in about 10 bags of compost to amend the soil. They failed to remove all of the tree roots from the VERY large tree nearby, which made the digging of holes ROUGH.

I then went with a co-worker of mine to pick out plants for the front bed and thank the sweet baby Jesus that we had his help. He worked his tail off helping us... LB almost died pushing this cart without the benefit of vision.

We got home and my co-worker and I spaced everything out on the weed blocker goodness that our yard guys had put down. 

I did too much that weekend...

...but we got everything in and two weeks later, EVERYTHING IS STILL ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a miracle!

We planted everything and then went to get soaker hoses. In hindsight, I probably would have opted for spray soaker hoses so that we wouldn't have to be soooooo careful about where to try to bury them. But we are doing soaker hoses for about an hour at night and then a quick spray watering as well. 

We also just got about 20 bags of mulch from Home Depot, LB spread it all around, and we called it a day. 

I am quite happy with my new view from the front porch.

As fall and winter come, I have no idea what I am supposed to do/not do, so let's just hope I can keep these babies alive.

Fencing it In

I posted about some small changes out front that we were making a week or so ago. Well, since we have someone staying in our basement for a while, we wanted to give them their own entrance instead of shuffling past our cars in the carport on the right side of the house. You'll also notice the horizontal slats on the porch that have also been sent on to a better place. :) Carport to the right.

Fugly metal fence to the left that didn't really open and close at all.

Plan where I showed my thoughts on separating the gravel from the extended flower bed that has yet to be extended with a fence that did not exist yet. 

Well, while I was in SLC last weekend visiting friends, LB got that fence built on the left side of the house. I kid, I kid. Our crazy cheap crown molding guy did it. And. It. Looks. Awesome. LB did, however, spend the whole weekend working on the house and cleaning up the front and back porches, plus managing Cheap Dude. The house definitely looks a MILLION times better. I feel like we have claimed this formerly dead space on the left of the house now.

The other major difference is that LB removed those previously mentioned horizontal slats on the front porch. It opens the house up a ton and makes the porch feel 900 times bigger. I pulled up to the house on Sunday night from the airport and said out loud, "Woah. That doesn't even look like my house." In the best possible way, it totally doesn't.

You can see that I still need to get dirt to blend these two beds together: the left is gravel and the right is dirt/where the red bricks used to be.

Here is the question: do we paint the fence white or leave it stained its glorious cedar stain? My vote is to leave it because I feel like it will be too much white, but perhaps it would also look really "clean" and cohesive.

Consider also that since LB removed the horizontal bars on the porch we have been talking about wrapping the posts in cedar for looks and strength (double threat posts!).

Cast your vote in the comments!