Front Yard Project

Thomas and I started the front yard project right after Easter. Every year we do a family Easter egg hunt (because life is too short to grow up all at once) - and my mom does something fun, instead of putting candy in the eggs, she puts numbers and those numbers are tied to a list of "gifts" some are monetary gifts, some are "nights out with mom and dad" and others are service based. This year Thomas and I got like 2 family service projects. So we wasted no time in recruiting our family to help us break-up the foundation pieces on our cinder block wall and take it to the dump {which was my first trip ever and definitely worth another blog post...if I get around to it}. 

Early morning family service

 Well, now that we had the block wall out of the way, we felt like it was time to work on our yard. I mean, we had like 3 other projects going, and 1 in particular that is super important to finish...buuuuuuut this new idea was taking hold...and the block wall was gone, so...

Well, for starters: grass/sod is expensive, so we were looking at just seed, but birds are annoying...and then my dad called soon after we had made some designs and plans and said one of his neighbors landscaped their yard and had a few leftover pieces of sod and do we want it? We hmmm and haaah'd because we were concerned about our water bill {seriously? the whole yard will be grass eventually what's a few square feet to get started}, we finally agreed and Thomas went with our truck and picked up the scraps.

After some serious doodles during sacrament meeting and consulting with each other on our lunch breaks, we came up with a beautiful front yard oasis. Complete with climbing roses, a gazebo, paver patio, and 6ft hedges. The scraps of sod were a good start and we picked up our climbing roses next.

After we installed the roses we got some fishing line and using concrete screws we attached the fishing line to the block wall so the roses had something to cling to. The far left climber still hasn't bloomed, but all the other climbers have these beautiful multicolored roses. They are so pretty.

Wide shot of the bland yard.

I guess I forgot to mention that the sod was pretty much dead. So Thomas got up early each morning and proceeded to water our little patch every morning and every night.

Soon it turned green!! We kind of joked that we had our own putting green...but we knew it would be a matter of time before we had more grass...not sure exactly where we were going to get it though, my parents don't have THAT many neighbors.

We added oleanders!

 Welcome 6ft hedge! Well. It will be 6ft eventually.

 Things were really coming together...so we figured since our grass patch was doing well we started looking at pavers...but if we thought grass was expensive! Pavers are SUPER pricey. That didn't stop us from going to Home Depot and wandering around the gardening section and pricing and re-pricing the different varieties of stones. Then on a random Monday, our neighbor two doors down came over while Thomas was watering the yard and explained that he was foreclosing on his house and he had a whole bunch of gardening stuff that we could have, along with some pavers! So Tuesday night and Wednesday morning we moved 3 truck fulls of pavers and a whole bunch of gardening and Halloween stuff.

Path pavers

 Thomas kept up the watering and if you look closely you can see the pavers for our patio space.

Thomas watering the grass

 Everything was growing great! Our roses were getting bigger.

 We spent a lot of time at Home Depot, wandering around and one day Thomas saw that the sod they were selling was pretty dried out, so Thomas talked to the manager to see if we could get a discount and he just gave us the rest of the grass!! So we got it free! 

Free!!

Free-99

Well, Thomas got to thinking that if one Home Depot had dead grass, maybe another would...so we went to another Home Depot and they had 3 pallets full of grass and they gave it to us because they were getting a new shipment the next day and were just throwing away this stuff! So bam! we got more grass!

Keep on watering...

Thomas has been so dedicated with watering the yard, we just got some sprinkler things that we used to play in as kids so he doesn't have to stand out there and water it all by hand. We got some black tarp stuff from Costco and we're going to re-purpose the rock we scrapped off before we put the grass down, and use it to have a path. We are also going to plant grass or clovers between the pavers and eventually we will extend the roof line out to create an over hang. So it's still a work in progress, but we have accomplished A LOT in just about 2 months.

Yay! Coming together!