Curb Appeal: Before and After

As of Sunday afternoon at 4:35 PM, Travis and I finally finished our landscaping project!!!!! We are SO GLAD to be through. As with most all of our projects, this one turned into something bigger than we ever anticipated…both in how much money it cost and how much time we spent on it. I just hope it will be worth the effort. I know how much money we spent on the project, but there’s no telling how many hours we spent researching plants, going to nurseries, digging holes, breaking up huge chunks of red clay, moving drainage pipes, lining rocks along the flower beds, planting flowers and shrubs, and mulching. It has definitely consumed most of our free time since mid-February.

Since neither of us had ever done anything like this before, we were pretty much just learning as we went along. That’s half the fun of it, right? Here are some things we learned along the way:

1. Drainage pipes in flower beds are a hassle! We patched holes in it once and later rerouted it trying to move it to the best possible spot, and it still ended up being in the way! Note to self: The next house we buy will either need to have beautiful flower beds already or a different drainage system. Or, maybe we’ll just live in this house forever :) I don’t want to even think about moving after doing all this work!

2. Sometimes it helps to have a map. I laughed at Travis for drawing our flower beds on graph paper with measurements, but it really was helpful when we got to the nursery to know how much room we had for planting. Yay for an engineer husband!

3. Digging those holes is no joke. I never dreamed it would take as long as it did to get everything planted, especially the shrubs. We followed the directions for digging the holes (twice as wide and 1.5 times as deep as the pot), and that made for some MASSIVE holes. Poor Travis did all of the digging, and I was the measurer. He’s gotten quite a workout since we started this project; I think he dug 17 holes this past Saturday alone.

4. Even concrete foundation can’t stop a man on a mission. When we got ready to plant our cute little hostas along the side of the house near the front porch, it didn’t take much digging to find out that the house’s foundation was taking up most of the room where we were trying to dig. No problem for Travis. Since we don’t have a jackhammer (ha!), he resorted to using the pickaxe to chip away at the concrete until we had enough room to plant our 3 little hostas. It took over 2 hours to dig those 3 holes. Now if our house starts sagging, I guess we’ll say it was a bad idea…haha. But, for now, it seems to have been worth all the trouble!

5. Doing the job right ain’t cheap or easy, but it usually works out for the best. I would say that “Do the job right” is probably Travis’s motto for life. I’m always the one wanting us to get done faster, and he’s the one saying “No shortcuts!”. Well, even though it took this long to get finished, I’m really happy with the results. I guess we could have just gone to Lowe’s or Home Depot and bought a bunch of shrubs and flowers without researching them beforehand, but hopefully this way, we’ve picked out stuff that won’t get too out of control and will look good and grow well where we’ve planted it.

Now, without further ado, here are a few “before” pictures to show you what we were dealing with a couple of months ago:

Back in September….before our hard work began!

Little pitiful looking shrubs…and lots of weeds!

Back in October, we dug up everything!

A blank slate!!

And, now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…..

HOORAY!

Side view (with the mailbox, trees, and driveway)

The mailbox!

Here, we planted two Daisy May Shasta Daisies…

What the daisies will look like! :)

Big maple tree with fresh mulch and new rocks!

The magnolia…where I’ll be planting some day lilies later this spring/summer

The other maple tree!

Small flower bed by the garage door….our hydrangeas are really growing!

Left flower bed

Another view of the left flower bed

If you want to read about the shrubs we planted a few weeks ago, go here. Since then, we planted a Tropical White Canna on the corner by the green tower boxwood. Here’s what it will look like in bloom:

Tropical white canna

We also planted 3 wolverine hostas in between some of the shrubs we’d already planted.

What the wolverine hostas will look like full grown

This past weekend, we planted some small flowers called Astra Double Blue balloon flowers in front of the shrubs. They won’t bloom until summer, but hopefully they’ll be really pretty and add some color to the left flower bed…

Astra Double Blue balloon flowers

Moving along…

The front entry area…ignore the dirty sidewalk! :)

You can see 3 small hostas on the right and 2 on the left…the right side near the house is where Travis went to town with that pickaxe!

Twist of lime hosta…one of our favorite things we planted!

Right flower bed

Right flower bed again

You can read about the shrubs and the Japanese maple that we planted a few weeks ago here.  On Saturday, we added some perennial flowers at the front of the bed. We picked out four different types. None of them are really blooming yet, so this is what they’ll hopefully look like soon! :)

Arizona Sun gaillardia…also called a blanket flower

Professor Kippenburg dwarf aster

Snowdrop anemone

Tuscan Sun heliopsis

We tried to pick out flowers that will bloom throughout the spring, summer, and fall at different times, so we’ll see how we did over the next few months I guess!

So, that’s it I guess! I’m not sure the pictures do it justice, but it really is a huge improvement. And, hopefully it will look even better in a few years when the shrubs are bigger and more substantial. Right now, everything is still small, but even in just a few weeks, it’s been amazing to see how much they’ve already grown!

Was it worth all the time and money spent? We think so!! :)

Travis says our next big landscaping project will be sodding the front yard, but that will probably have to wait until next spring.

And, after that….maybe we’ll be ready to tackle making some flower beds along the back of the house! At least we’d be starting with a blank canvas there!! Give us a few years and we’ll have forgotten how much work this all was!! :)