Landscaping

After we finished the living room and dining room floors, one of the next projects we took on was landscaping in the front yard. Several of the bushes and shrubs around the front of the house were dead or dying (especially those two at the very front of the house pictured below).

Jeff used to do landscaping in the summers during high school and college, so this was one of the projects he was most excited about. The first thing he did was saw off all of the limbs of those bushes. Then he went about the task of digging up the 50+ year old roots. I was at work the day he did this, but I think it involved a lot of muscle and an attempt to wrap them in chains and pull them out with a friend's pick-up truck.


He finally got them out. Here's all the debris on the street in front of our house. It's basically taking up all of our curb space.

Then Jeff selected some grass and different varieties of Juniper. My only desire was to have hydrangea bushes. We had some mulch delivered, and here is what it looked like right after everything was planted:

This is what it looks like about two years later:

And we've done a bit more work around the sides of the house in the past year including planting wild flowers along the walkway, and a digging up another dying bush and replacing it with a peony bush near the front door.

And when we moved in all of these day lilies were clustered together toward the front of the garage, so I spread them out along the the length of the garage, and they finally bloomed for the first time this summer.

Now, the back yard is a whole different story. Maybe someday we will focus on that, but for now we like that we have a bit more curb appeal.