Spring Break=Yard Work

This week has been my spring break from school and I have enjoyed it SO much.  I have gotten many things accomplished, one of them being cleaning up our yard.  

Here's a picture of our house right after we closed last April.  

Here's a picture taken last Saturday.

We had some large boxwoods on either side of our porch that, although large, were not very healthy.  Up close they were scraggly and needed some love.  We decided to cut them back a bit and hope they grow back nicely.  Right now they look kind of sad. haha

As you may notice, there's a gap between some bushes.  This gap has bothered me from day one of owning our house.  At first I thought that shrubs once grew in the gap, but from all the old drawings and house plans that we have found, there has never been anything growing in this space.

So we plated 5 Wintergreen Boxwoods in the empty space.  (From the street you can only see two of them.)

It makes Cory & me laugh, but the small bushes were cheaper.  Hopefully they'll grow a lot this summer.  We have been mulching around our house as well.

In September we got rid of some dying boxwoods by our porch and planted some Hawthorne bushes.  They are now blooming and so nice.  Our shrub beds are lined with monkey grass up until where the large bushes used to be so on Saturday we planted some monkey grass to continue the edging.

Oh, and this is not yard related, but I got a new doormat and I think it's cute.  So here's a picture of it.

This is the side of our house where monkey grass had grown everywhere.

Here it is now.  Our azaleas need a little loving after this season too.  Their blooms are beautiful now, but their leaves aren't growing.

This is my favorite spot outside of our house.  I love the little iron gate with the ivy growing up on post.

This is to the right after entering the gate.

We added some monkey grass and mulch to clean it up and make it more defined.

Here's a shot of the back of our house.

We have(had) some scraggly bushes back here too!

They were getting too tall so we chopped the down.  Hopefully they'll grow back!

We had lots of things growing right here.

 We had some neat ferns but they kinda took over so we took them out.

 Here's a shot after we butchered those bushes.

Mom got Cory & me some little stepping stones with a crown (for King) and a "K" on them that we used to make a mini-path to our backyard's water faucet.

The back patio is not in great shape.  The tiles are breaking and coming loose in some spots.  We'll eventually redo the whole thing but for now we just cleaned it.

Here's a dogwood tree in the corner of our yard.  I love the pink blooms!  We had to cut a large branch off of it because it was dead.  

It looks naked now!  The pretty pink blooms are still on top, I just didn't get it in my picture.  Eventually we would like to put a bench or something to sit on in this spot under the tree. We also are going to plant some flowers in this bed at some point.

And here's the other gate on the other side of our yard.

You can't really tell but there were TONS of dead oak leaves all over our yard.  They were piled up in crevices around the fence and monkey grass borders.  

I can't even remember how many loads of leaves we dumped in the woods that day.  It made a big improvement, though.

This is a before shot but I thought I'd add it anyway.

While it's not a huge yard transformation, it's a step in a good direction.  I just wanted to post our progress and let you see what our backyard looks like. :)  

I have enjoyed working outside with Cory on this project but I must say, I'm glad it's over.  I don't think I am made to work outdoors for long because during this experience I have gotten poison ivy, bark in my eye (it took forever to get out and hurt very bad), chased by a few bees...seriously, got scared by 2 frogs that were snake-like, and found a tick crawling on me.  Yep, I'm a wuss.