more landscaping

although there are a thousand projects to be started, completed or somewhere in between, the main focus this summer has been starting the bathroom remodel and the landscaping. more about the bathroom later, this post is about the landscaping.

chad has been busy implementing his landscape plan developed a few years ago. time and money have forced us to complete it in stages. last year it was the part of the back yard, part of the south side yard, and the north side yard. this year is continuation of the back yard and the south side yard. hopefully next year will be the front yard.
the above pictures show the back yard, the newest bed in the lower left corner and then a new tree, a river birch, with flowers given to us by chad's aunt. the bed in the back left is still under construction. it's our "holding cell" for replacement plants at this point.

this is the side yard. we have three types of hydrangeas in three different beds (hydrangeas are my favorite). currently i have tomato plants and some herbs in this new bed in the side yard but they will be gone at the end of the summer. i'll have to find a new place for them next year!

flowers from our yard

isn't it such a great feeling to display a vaes of flowers cut from your own yard? this is my favorite vase, too. bought it at the penrod art fair last year. love the color.

rain, rain go away

the rain we had over memorial day weekend didn't stop chad from planting in our newest bed.

the great outdoor ... table

i am SO excited. do you remember earlier this year i posted about an outdoor table from sundance catalog that i loved? i'm on this kick where i really want original furniture for our house. anyways, i'd like for our outdoor table and our living room coffee and/or end tables to be made from old barn wood. well, this weekend we got a step closer to the outdoor table of my dreams.

see that dirty wood leaning against the garage? someone recently gave us some old barn wood! (ask and you shall receive). oh it may not look like much now but you wait.

one day it will look like this. but there will be a matching bench next to it.

i mean, check out that post. it's massive. this thing is going to be so freakin' heavy. and stylish.

don't let this happen to you

it was still too damn hot to do anything on the house on sunday but we had no choice. look at the weeds in one of our newly planted beds! i mean - where are the plants? where are the weeds? who in the hell really knows? the decent amount of rain we've received this summer is not only a boon to our friends, the plants, but to our enemies, the weeds, as well.





















so on sunday we bought some cheapo mulch and went at the weeding. omg. i'm waaay too old to be hunched over for five hours pulling weeds. my back & legs are feelin' it today. i bet the neighbors are happy though. looks better.

flafoos

think that's a weird title for my post? according to my parents that is what i used to call flowers when i was little.
over the past few months we've installed about 1/4 to 1/2 of our landscape plan. some of you may know that chad is a landscape architect and we've also joked that for the past 4 years our neighbors probably don't believe that fact because our yard has been not great. the only thing we've done up until now was tear out whatever landscaping the POs had in the ground. (we did this immediately so as to fool the neighbors when we first moved in. here they thought something was going to be installed in place of the things we tore out. silly.) chad did tear up the entire back yard and re-seeded which has given us beautiful thick really green grass. also, we've planted like 9 trees or something. but now we have flaffoos! yeah!
these pictures are not the greatest but you can get the idea. here are corabells (i really don't know if that is the right name) in the front of the bed, the daisies and in the back are hydrangeas. i am SUPER excited about those.


in the next picture you can see the dead grass where the bed is going to be extended to our future sidewalk. we'll work on this part of the bed this weekend. (and by "we" i really mean chad.)

this is one of the beds i posted about over a month ago. while i was in florida chad planted hostas and corabells in this bed. and finally our dogwood is doing well. that thing has been a wimp for the past few years but i think it is coming out of its slump.

so nice to see some actual progress! also i apologize if i butchered these plant names. plants aren't my thing and i'm really too lazy to go look up the proper spelling and stuff.

plant this !

unless you count trees and new grass we've done little landscaping since we've moved into the house almost four years ago. this year some of that is changing. chad has been reworking his landscape plans and ordered several types of plants from a couple of online nurseries. this is what he accomplished today. we actually started on the side of the house where people hardly see except for our next door neighbors. i'm sure they are very happy about the improvements though. MUCH better than weeds, don't you think?

flats before planting ~



yard before planting ~ ~ yard after planting