A little landscape project

I haven't written about any of our house projects in a while since my mind has been completely consumed with the newest addition to the Denton family but I wanted to take you back almost 2 years ago to a weekend project we did to our front yard. When we bought our house, it had a picturesque white picket fence in the front yard but the a few things that really bothered me was its lack of purpose and also the mailman tromped through our flowerbeds every single day instead of going around to the sidewalk. Here is a picture of the front yard before our project (not bad, but  not great!).

If you look closely, you can see a small rope that I tied from the far right fence post to the gutter...I did this to make the mailman go all the way around. Isn't that terrible?!

We spent hours and hours and hours digging out those awful boxwood shrubs that had roots for days buried many feet under the ground. It was a great workout but I wanted to scream at how long it took to get them out of the ground. The fence posts were cemented into the ground and I took those out one Saturday morning when Keith was playing golf. Most of my projects start when Keith is away...I just get these crazy ideas and usually can't wait to start them. Plus if I start a project, Keith will always help me finish it! I remember laying on the front driveway at one point, completely exhausted and taking a break from digging out those darn fence posts, and one of our neighbors stopped to ask what in the world I was doing. He mentioned that I should wait for my husband to return from golf but I couldn't wait that long and kept on digging.  

A friend of mine that I work with had the idea to make a flagstone walkway surrounding the light and even made a little sketch for us. I can't claim full credit so all we did was the backbreaking labor. I didn't get any pictures of the project in progress...probably because we were too tired during the weekend.  Once we dug out all the shrubs and fence, we had to dig out a massive amount of dirt to make room for the flagstone. The pile of dirt we dug out was as wide as a queen bed sheet and about 3 feet tall. A few trips to Home Depot, Calloway's and Lowe's later, we had this finished project below. (It took an entire weekend, working 12 hours each day to complete the flagstone and put in the shrubs. Whew, next time, I think I'd like to hire someone to do the labor!)

Sadly, the azaleas died in the back of this flowerbed so I moved the dwarf pittosporums to the back and just plant seasonal flowers a few times a  year. We haven't mulched the flowerbeds in 2 years but now that we finally (as of 1 month ago) have gutters that work properly, we can put in mulch next spring. Every time that it would rain, we would have a waterfall cascading over the roof and it would flood all of our flowerbeds and with those floods, most of our mulch washed down the street.

So pretty!

We painted the front door black and I made a cute spring wreath to go with the new look. The wreath has lasted and is actually hanging on our front door right now.