We worked outside all day yesterday. It may not have been the most relaxing way to spend the long weekend, but it was a little fun to celebrate the end of summer by tearing out a bunch of shrubs and landscaping on the front side of our house.

We needed to fix up a way to prevent our wildlife friends from setting up camp under our front porch again this year.

And the best way to do that, we figure, is to build up the dirt in that flower bed and prevent them from burrowing down under our porch.

See this hole? We need to fill it in and cover it up.

At least, we hope adding a foot or two of more of dirt will help with that…we’ll see I guess.

We took this opportunity to work on upgrading the general look of the area by adding more substantial landscaping stones to the edge as well. And we got a sweet deal of these by buying them second-hand earlier this spring.

So, without further ado, here’s the before pic from the front of our house yesterday:

Here’s what it looked like earlier this spring (better, but not great, and the home to a happy groundhog):

We started by digging out the mums and saving them, or at least making a general effort to save them, to reuse somewhere later this fall.

Then, Wyatt used the chainsaw to cut off all the awful shrubs.

 

We got a pile of debris pretty quick with us both ripping stuff out at the same time.

 

I’m super excited our front door is no longer being hidden by this giant ugly tree/shrub/mess.

I was sad to see the barberries go. Not! He chopped them with the chainsaw and then I dug around the remaining roots to remove them. It’s important to remove as much as possible to keep the roots from sprouting up.

We also dug out the existing rock edge, which was pretty buried in the grass and serving no real purpose anymore.

 

The stones are still nice though, so we hope to reuse those in some way.

Moving around the side of the house, we tackled this monster. Yes, the shrub is eating Wyatt. It was a desperate attempt to save him, and the house.

We had to just chop/break/hatchet this giant mess at the ground, though. It was too big and too close to the house to do much else. Thanks to the magic of the blog world you can watch it go from the above picture to the halfway point:

 

…and all the way to the finish line in a matter of seconds.

It really took us a couple of hours. It fought a hard battle, but we were victorious.

Shout out to all my landscaping buds from the good old days of finding hidden rock underneath the mulch when trying to remove giant shrubs from overgrown flower beds. Fun time, I’m telling you.

We did spray it with some shrub-killer though, so hopefully it won’t sprout like crazy and come back. I guess time will tell.

Doesn’t it look better already? And this is without having it all cleaned up. I just want to stand out there and say, “Why, hello, front porch! So nice to actually see you today!”

We ended up with a big pile of debris to haul off somewhere. Good grief. I’m leaving it there to torture the barberries with the threat of their impending destruction.

We even got a few stones laid down yesterday on our new edge but we have plenty more work to go on that project, so I’ll save the post about it for later.

In the meantime, just know that we’re tired. Oh, and here’s what it looks like right now:

I’m still open to suggestions on what to replant up here, so feel free to shout out your favorites, although just to warn you, I’m kind of anti-shrub, so I don’t want anything that requires trimming regularly. (I hate yews and boxwoods for that reason!) My sister votes for roses. Wyatt would prefer nothing probably-ha! I’m still undecided, so please help!

Oh, and tell us what you did for Labor Day! Did you labor outside like us? Or relax in the A.C.?