;)

I still thought the house looked a little stark, so I went and got a few yard decorations.

How do you think this looks?

Front Yard

I took a few days off this week and Jason and I tackled the front yard re-do.

This was the front of the house before we moved in.

This was the front garden bed. We were not impressed. At first, we really didn't care for the yuccas, but I realized that taking them all out would be a huge endeavour.

So, we started to design around the yuccas. We weeded the beds, took out all of the other plants, and I trimmed back the yuccas to clean up the look a bit.

We wanted to go for a very low maintenance design, and I thought that white rocks instead of mulch might be a nice contrast to the orange bricks.

Jason shoveled over half a ton of rocks yesterday. God love him.

We put down landscapers fabric to keep any future weeds out.

Instead of planting into the ground, we decided to buy some colorful pots. They were having a 1/2 sale at Houston Garden Center last week. It took over 2 hours to pick out these pots. When we got up to the register, they told us our biggest pot wasn't 1/2 off. I kinda had a minor fit and told them their ads were misleading - I was tired and hot and the dang pot would have been really expensive if we had to buy it full price. So, we went to our car, potless, and started to drive off. The manager ended up sending the check out girl after us. Needless to say, we ended up getting the pots 1/2 off. However, I can't say that I'm a fan of Houston Garden Center now. We went to Buchanan's in the Heights for the rest of our gardening needs.

The result. The plants have yellow, red, and blue flowers. I'm so paranoid that after the whole pot debacle that they will end up getting stolen (not related to each other, of course, more of a karma thing), so we chained them to each other. We just hid the chains under the rocks. Any thieves will have a nice surprise if they try to take off with them.

We also worked on this bed.

I particularly like how this turned out.

Jason wanted a rock border around this plant, so we got boulders to match the other rocks.

The final result.

Last night I started having doubts about our design because I thought it looked too stark.

So I went and bought some patio furniture to soften up the look. (I found the chair, table, pillow, and pot at Target on clearance and spent about $75 on the whole set.)

The new final result.

We are going to hang some black shutters around the window on the left which should also help soften the look. Today, the look is growing on me. It looks nice as you drive by from the street and it is definitely an improvement from the beginning.

Backyard

We worked out in the yard today.

Remember how the herbs were planted along the garage? We weren't a fan of them being right there. They were full of weeds, and we rather just plant grass up to the garage.

So, we went to Lowe's and Home Depot and picked out some pots and potting soil.

Jason had a pretty good method of getting the plants out without harming their roots. Hopefully, they will all survive.

I also washed our $15 patio set and set it up.

Backyard end result.

We also started on the front bed. It just looks cluttered and messy right now.

Another view. I think we have decided to keep all of the yuccas and add more desert themed plants to match them.

We decided to replant some of the plants in the back.

All of the yellow speckled plants were moved to this bed in the back.