Front yard re-designing! This has been quite the overhaul for us, and is only halfway there. We have always wanted the house to have more "landscaping symmetry" -- we had pavement covering up one side of the house, and a random flower bed on the other. We learned that to have pretty landscaping where we wanted it that it would require us to:
- Install 50 foot long 15 inch deep french drain in front of house
- Remove/replace all old landscaping
- Remove all pavement (wrapped all the way around the side of the house in front of our sunroom)
- Rebuild walkway out of pavers
- Cement base of house to look smooth and block out moisture
- Build retaining wall between driveway & sunroom space
- Create step-stone path leading form driveway to porch
- Plant in front of sunroom, both sides of porch, and in front of kitchen
- Fill in old landscaping island with dirt/grow grass
... and that's exactly what we've been doing...
We're no where near done, but thought I'd share some pictures of the progress. It doesn't look like much, but hope to have plants in soon as we are in the peak planting season. More to come!
Sorry, I don't have a summertime "before" picture, but this should give you the general idea.
Just some of the pavement -- notice it goes right up to the sunroom
-- sunrooms are supposed to have gardening in their windows, not concrete!
I want to say that I thought we should hold off on taking out the old (cracked) walkway, but Josh was not having it! Once all of the pavement was broken, we had two full dump trucks of it in our front yard -- ugh.
Putting the family to work on the new walkway.
Possibly one of the hardest manual labor jobs I've ever done -- digging a french drain! Sounds simple, but it is so hard.
50' french drain installed - check!
Retaining wall, stepping stones, down-spout drainage installed, cemented foundation,
and pavers down on walkway - check!
