Curb Appeal

We bought our house in 1999... and when we did, the front lawn was lush and lovely. The flower beds were full of 50 year old shubberies. And the previous owner left us a nicely designed array of hoses and sprinklers that we could turn on and off as needed to maintain the landscape.

We immediately had the shrubbery taken out, replacing them with some newer, more modern plantings.

However, over the years, Asia and I have discovered that neither of us enjoys/wants to do yard work. At all. I certainly don't want to do it if he's not going to do it. He started making the boys do the lawn mowing when they were barely tall enough to reach the handle of the lawnmower just so he wouldn't have to.

This led to quite a few years of barely doing anything to the yard. We would water haphazardly... and I would complain that the grass was getting brown. We tried to reseed in places with no success. The two big pine trees out there suck up a tremendous amount of water and gradually, more and more of the lawn died.

I gave up altogether on the beds... doing my best to keep them weeded a couple of times a year, but really, I lost total interest in them because the lawn looked so bad.

Last summer was the final blow. Not only did we leave for almost four weeks in the hottest part of the summer (leaving instructions with the housesitter not to bother watering... we once came home from a vacation to a flooded basement when a housesitter left our manual sprinklers on for HOURS...) AND we had to have our sewer line from the house to the street redone, creating a huge swath of overturned dirt, rocks, and eventually, weeds.

We gave up altogether and became the scourge of the neighborhood.

We discussed how to address it. Asia wanted to pay a landscaper to hydroseed. I felt that would be money thrown away, since our watering efforts in the past had resulted in dead grass anyway.

Eventually, we both came to the conclusion that if we wanted a lasting, low maintenance result, we needed to dig deep into our pockets, splurge on underground sprinklers, and redo EVERYTHING.

And so we did. We contracted with a company, telling them we wanted the most low-maintenance yard/beds they could design.

This is what they came up with.

I honestly feel like I have a new house every time I pull into the driveway. Every morning when I hear my auto-sprinklers come on my heart skips a beat, knowing that my grass/plants will live and thrive and that all we have to do now is mow.

What a fun transformation. I'm thrilled with the results and so happy we were able to finally get what we wanted... I can't wait to see it a year from now when all the plantings have filled in... and the grass is STILL green...

I think today I will splurge on a new welcome mat... =)

Welcome to my new home.