Yard Work

When we bought our house last year we knew that we wanted to declutter the yard but by the time we were done getting the inside ready to live in it was too hot outside to do much work. This year we decided that we would get some outside work done, so in early April we had a dying tree cut down, removed quite a few shrubs and moved a few others. Then, since we like to do things as close as possible to when people will be visiting us, we had mulch delivered a few days before Kerri and Shannon were going to arrive and I spent a day distributing it around the house while Billie was at work. Below are some before and after photos of our yard work:

Note the large shrubs in front of the entryway and the dead/dying tree just to the left of the house.

Although the fact that leaves had grown in makes it harder to see, note that you can actually see the porch in this picture.

This view shows the tree next to the house that we had cut down as well as some of the shrubs in front of the house.

Here they have been replaced by grass and mulch.

This was apparently a "butterfly bush" that was long-past the point of trimming. There was another on the right side of the house.

The bush is gone (as is the one on the side of the house) and is replaced by grass. I don't miss it.

Here is another view of the front of the house showing how big the front shrubs were.

And here is the way it looks now. Note that we planted grass in front of the sidewalk since we have more than enough space to plant flowers between the sidewalk and the house.

This view doesn't have a "before" picture to go with it, but it demonstrates the new grass pattern and open space in front of the house.

Finally, we have a picture of the mulch around the bushes in the back of the house. Other than pulling weeds out we didn't change anything back here.

Now that things are cleaned up, maybe we'll get around to planting some flowers next year!