The next house project is here!

18+ months

We took almost three whole months off doing anything at the house! I don't think we even changed a light bulb around here. That unproductivity doesn't last long though so we got moving on the front yard. This part of the house has been embarrassing since the day we moved in but we had other important projects that needed our time so it took us a year and a half to get to it.





This is the house about a week after we moved in. Doesn't look too bad, right? Now let's zoom in some.



Not too bad here either. Some dead grass, some randomness going on in the left landscaping bed and then almost nothing on the right landscaping bed.



Yikes! Last spring, all of this was driving me nuts. While avoiding the deck work, we cleaned it up a bit.



It is obviously a huge improvement but it stayed like this the entire summer. Since we removed all the weed plastic, this meant that after a little bit of time, the bed was covered in more weeds…...dirt, random plants and weeds. You may remember how freaking hot this summer/fall was and as a result our lily plants (all those little bushes) did not survive. Add in some mounds of dried up plants and it was not pretty.

In early fall, Joe added a drainage system to the front yard. The downspout came down right next to the house and did not have anywhere to drain. He dug up and added some piping then ran it under the sidewalk and all the way over to the side corner of the house where the other downspout is.



You can see in this picture where the downspout is hooked up to the black tubing. It runs through to the grate and then runs out towards the bottom right corner of the picture. At this point, some of the plants are already dying out.



Weeds are coming back and in the back of the picture you can see where Joe trenched the drainage tubing.



Now that it flows with the slope of the yard, we are keeping the water away from the house.



This is as good a before picture I have of the right side of our landscaping. Other than the big bush, it was just grown up weeds, grass and crap. In the spring, we had tulips come up but they were very badly placed (like 10 bulbs all right next to each other and it looked really stupid).

So that's where we were before this weekend began. This is already getting long enough so I'll stop there and update you on the progress in the next installment. I'll leave you with the To-Do list.

Remove dead plants
Regrade slope of landscaping beds to drain correctly
Add edging pavers on right landscaping bed
Trim big bush in right landscaping bed
Transplant 2 bushes in back of left bed to the right bed
Transplant tulip bulbs for planter boxes
Lay plastic down in both beds
Cover with rock
Paint garage door black
Wrap garage door trim with aluminum (same as siding)
New black shutters
Paint front door window inset black
New door numbers by front door
Buy/Build planter boxes for flowers
Seed yard