Front yard projects

When we bought our house it wasn't exactly dripping in curb appeal. Here's a reminder:



(Looking back at these pics its hard to believe we wanted this house so badly!)



Last year we put some plants in the flower bed, painted the front door and replaced the hardware, and switched out the light. While I was happy with the transformation I thought the front porch needed a little pizazz. I am definitely a fan of clutter-free spaces but it was looking a little plain, even for me.

I came across this marked down urn at Home Goods.



It was deeply discounted because of some damage to the top. I figured I would just turn that part to the back and no one would notice.

The color was fine but since the light fixture is black I decided to spray paint the urn black to match. I probably could have just left it that dark brown color and no one would have noticed that it didn't match, but it would have bugged me every time I saw at it.



I added a bushy fern and now our front porch is much more interesting.



I love it!

Our next project involved tackling an eyesore that we had ignored since we moved into the house. You can just see it on the right of the driveway in that first pic at the top of the post. Here's a close-up:





The previous owners put down landscape fabric, covered it with mulch and called it a day. The two California oak trees over there drop leaves year round so the area quickly filled up with leaves and has probably looked like that for years. Anytime we'd get a little rain weeds would start growing like crazy. We hated the area but we had no idea what to do about it. We thought about planting something but the ground was rock hard and filled with tree roots. Finally we decided to get some quotes to have concrete poured. When the quote came back we couldn't believe the price --- $2,700!! So that was the end of that idea!

Then one day we got the idea to fill the area with river rocks - I have no idea why we didn't think of it sooner! We placed our order and then quickly got to work cleaning out the area.



While it didn't look great it looked a lot better. I don't know why we didn't at least do that right away - I'm a little embarrassed that we left it looking like such a mess for so long.

The next morning a HUGE pile of river rocks was dumped on our driveway. I was worried we hadn't ordered enough but when we saw the pile I realized we probably over-ordered - ooops!



Most of the rocks were normal shaped but I was excited to find this heart-shaped one - I saved it to put somewhere inside the house :-)



After a lot of hard work it now looks like this:





So much better right?!

I just realized I don't have a shot of the whole front of our house but I'm sure you can imagine it looks much better than that first photo from when we first moved in!

Mini facelift

We love our house but when we moved in it was tied for the ugliest house on the street. Not much going on in the curb appeal department. Well no one wants that label so over the summer we did a few projects to spruce up the front of our house.

We had barren flower beds (the previous owners put down landscape fabric, covered it with mulch, and called it a day), random empty pots on the patio, and a less than fresh paint job that was peeling in parts.

Painting the exterior of the house was out of the question so we got to work on a few less pricey projects. As I've mentioned before I have zero gardening ability and that combined with brutal 100+ degree summer heat meant that we needed to select difficult-to-kill plants. I noticed a lot of geraniums around the neighborhood and they appeared to be doing well so we decided to go with a few of those. I also added in a few asparagus ferns for some variety and they are doing okay thanks to only getting morning sun and being shaded from the harsh afternoon rays by the patio overhang.

The project that made the biggest difference was painting the green front door and other trim. We picked a really dark blue with a hint of green but in reality the color dried much lighter. (Although it looks black in the photo below - weird.) Even though the color isn't exactly what we wanted, just the fact that its freshly painted and not faded and peeling makes a big difference!
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Here's Josh getting ready to paint the shutters - I'm glad he went up on the roof because I'm so clumsy there's a 80% chance I would have lost my balance and fallen off!

Finally we replaced the yellow brass front door hardware with satin nickel. I am still looking for a replacement doorbell so for now it will be a lovely reminder of the former yellow look we had going on.

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Anyway, enough of me blabbing on and on ... here's how it looks now:

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(I dont think the little changes are very noticeable in the picture but in person it looks SO much better!)

(Please excuse the brown patches of grass. I had the great idea to fertilize the front lawn but unfortunately I made the rookie mistake of overdoing it in a few patches so now we have some lovely dead areas of lawn - oops. As soon as it cools off a little we will be putting some grass seed down.)

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Now its moved up to being the second ugliest house on the street!! :-P