Guys, exciting news: the rock wall on the front part of our house…is done!

Well, done for now.

Here’s the finished wall from the right side:

It’s a legit little wall—and I’m proud of Hubs’ handiwork.

And proud of his online bargain hunting skills that scored us these awesome second hand stones.

The end isn’t “finished because we still have to rip out the old edging and decide how we’re going to move down the side of the house. But we put a few stones in there to help hold any dirt run off we may have.

I worked on digging out dirt from the left side and moving it to the part we’re building up along the porch.

You may not be able to tell, but I took out several wheelbarrow loads of packed, hard, dirt, which dropped the level of the bed by the sidewalk to about 2 inches below the  concrete. We may have to go a bit deeper, but I think it’s okay for now. Here’s a reminder of what it looked like before:

We also moved some sod from one corner of the wall to this front part where we took out the big round “bump out.” We’ll see if it grows, but if not, we can seed it next year since we’ll probably need to do that in a few places anyway.

Overall, I’m super pleased with how it looks so far…even though we still have lots of work to do!

Along the side of the house, I dug out the sad, broken down lilac bush that Wyatt had chopped down the week before. It went from this:

To this:

In about an hour…all by myself, if I do say so myself.

And then, instead of weeding it, we just raked all the dirt and mulch back over it and are going to wait for the next step in the plan before wasting time weeding something we may just rip out later anyway…

We worked on this project a lot last weekend, too. If fact, my dad and Wyatt had some “fun” getting rid of our “yip-yip” tree.

Pretty soon it went from this:

To this:

And then the chainsaw chain died…or got way too dull to be effective at all. Apparently, the Yip Yips are tough little guys…

So Wyatt resorted to using his little skilsaw thing.

 

And then the guys got to work sawing by hand and pushing and pulling and basically just hacking it down anyway they could. Keep in mind, it was about 100 degrees at this point.

So, no more will we pull into the driveway and be reminded of these guys:

 

(It was a weeping mulberry, but it looked like a Yip Yip, right?)

Here’s the tree again:

And here are the Yip Yips:

 

Source

You see the similarity too right? Please tell me Hubs and I aren’t the only crazy ones…

For reference, here’s a look at the checklist for the front and how it’s going.

• Tear out existing shrubs, flowers, rock border
• Remove dirt from the shallow end of the bed (by the sidewalk) and add dirt to the deep end by the porch (we’ll need more dirt to add)
• Build a stone retaining wall to hold deeper dirt bed along porch
• Replant shrubs/flowers
• Add weed barrier and rock
• Possible capstones, additional design features?
• ——(We want to check into adding some capstones to the top…which we think would really set it off and make it look fancy. But we need to price them before we decide for sure on that.)

Sides:

• Remove flowers, trees, and shrubs
• Remove stone edging
• Remove plastic edging
• Remove old mulch, weeds, etc.
• Replace edging with small stone wall
• Replant ???
• Add weed barrier and rock

Now, we have to keep in mind that as work toward the back, it gets more tricky. Not only will we be working on landscaping, we’ll be working to tie it into the future deck and patio project. Nothing like a little long-term project to drag out a short term project, right?

What projects are you in the middle of? What’s the most/best/worst/hardest landscaping project you’ve ever tackled? What did you do this weekend? Please share!