Things are SPRINGing up around here!

I love spring time! Warmer weather, birds chirping, spring cleaning, things growing, MY BIRTHDAY... I absolutely love spring! So far this month we have gotten busy around here by finishing up our landscaping around the front of our house. Here is the progress so far starting from the very beginning.

This is before we even moved in Nov. of '09; before the original landscaping was put in.

 

This is after we moved in Dec. '09.

Another view of the front after we moved in. The four shrubs along the sidewalk have since been removed. We threw out three and the fourth matched the single shrub between the front door and the garage so we transplanted it to the other side of the garage for a more symmetrical look.

The three ugly shrubs were already taken out that aligned the sidewalk by the time I thought about taking pictures of our progress. You just can't see where they were in this picture. The one smaller shrub in the front right was taken out and moved to the right of the garage. 

Ugly bushes gone! My Mom pulled them out before I even knew we started.

 This is the new bed where we moved one of the existing shrubs. My step dad made this for me.

The finished product! I have since made a little adjustment to how wide the bed was to match the left side better. We decided to change the trim around it too so I will be taking the black plastic out and the idea right now is to put in brown metal trim. 

One on each side of the garage now.

 

This is what it looked like when we finished for the night. New dirt...

and no more ugly shrubs!

Two weeks later and I finally found the shrubs to replace what we took out. Aren't they so much prettier?!! And they smell SOOOOO GOOD!

Our big mess where we mixed in the new soil with the old.

The new shrubs will eventually fill in and we won't have such big gaps between the two of them.

TA-DAH!

I'm so happy with the progress so far. Next I'll be getting 4 small rose bushes to put in front of the shrubs that are up against the house to add some color. After we get those in we'll put in the trim, paint the white pipes sticking out of the ground brown and then fill it in with some more clean soil and top it off with our brown mulch. 

When we finish with the front it'll be time to work on the back yard. Right now our plans keep changing for the back as far as landscaping goes. We were thinking of putting in Red-Tip Photinias along our back fence to give us more privacy but Terry doesn't really like those because of his experience with them at his Dad's house where they have completely taken over and covered one side of their trailer. So we're back to square one with that. Terry really likes vines so I gave him to go ahead to put up whatever kind he wants in the back. One idea was to have Honeysuckle or something all along our back fence. I don't know if I'll get to it this year but definitely by next spring I'll have a place in the back for a little garden. I definitely want tomatoes, watermelon, strawberries and squash! I've already started filling in holes that Delilah has dug throughout the yard but I'll continue to fill those in (there are A LOT). We will also be putting up hot wire along the whole fence line to keep Delilah and hopefully our neighbors dogs from digging there.   Eventually we would love to have a slab poured or build a deck. I'm personally in favor of a slab. So that's it, that's our progress so far and our plans to finish. It's so exciting to see things finally start to take place.