We moved into our house five years ago. At that time, there were lots of big bushes in the front landscaping area, as well as a huge fir tree up front. Because we didn't trim back things the way we should have and then also just the very nature of them starting to get kind of woody, we finally decided to tear it all out and start over.
Sounds good, right?
Two years ago, Eric borrow a back hoe from someone (and a dump truck from someone else) and went to town tearing out all of the landscaping. He worked hard to try to remove lots of the rocks in the landscaping bed as well. And, then he covered it with red mulch. (We decided to do all of this after having a $3,000+ estimate on landscaping. Yikes!)
Well, the only problem? It has sat with just the red mulch for two years now. No plants. Just mulch. I liked to pretend it was the simple approach, but we probably weren't fooling anyone.
So...fast forward two years, and then we'll finally get to my tackle this past week.
While Eric was gone, we received a $100 rebate check on the washer and dryer we bought, so I thought, "Why not try to do some landscaping while he's gone as a surprise?"
I was trying to be thrifty, but I still spent an additional $100 on top of the $100 check that I had cashed. But, I figured I shouldn't be too upset having spent $200 on: a dwarf burning bush (got the medium sized one, instead of the smallest one they had), six geraniums (single plants), six large sets of annuals (petunias, salvias, and marigolds), seven hostas, three large cobalt blue pots, three bags of 2 cubic feet of moisture control potting soil, a set of 10 solar powered lights, a soaker hose (for the vegetable garden, since ours went bad), and a $4 molded plastic kiddie pool. Hey...now that I say that all, it doesn't sound too shabby at all!
With a lot of help from my Mom, I worked one whole day last week (including our trip to Menards, and a trip to an urgent care for Molly who got a puncture wound to the foot), and got it all done! (I was also lucky to have a friend from church come by to help with part of it as well.) Of course, it would have all gone much faster if it weren't for all those rocks in the soil under the mulch! Yikes!
Eric was thrilled when he got home from his trip to see the landscaping, so it made all of the work totally worth it!
I forgot to take "before" pictures, but just imagine it all not there, and that's the before pictures. Oh...that and you need to imagine it without such bright red mulch, since Eric then tackled it a little farther this weekend, and he put in some new mulch. Yeah!
So, I'm pretty darn psyched to finally have skipped out on that $3,000+ landscaping and put in a lot of sweat equity instead. By coming up with my own minimalist design that was doable by us, we saved ourselves several thousand dollars! And, of course, all of the small plants (hostas & burning bush) that we put in now will get bigger in time, so the landscaping will just get better and better!
Oh, and we've been getting tons of compliments from neighbors. Although, I suspect they're just really excited to see some plants and not just mulch.
(This is the dwarf burning bush -- it might get as big as six feet tall and six feet wide, so it will eventually fill in all that space it has.)
