House WORK

Hooray! Our fence is finally finished. It was completed yesterday by Jared Harrington of Harrington Builders (he's in our ward). Good job - I highly recommend him. Now that the fence is in the real work begins. Lance and I spent the day digging up the big rocks in the back yard and patching the holes in the grass in our front lawn. (The builder did a terrible job of laying the sod, thus the holes.)

Here are a few pictures to show how things look now - hopefully in a few months the "after" pictures will look a lot better! (Assuming we have enough time, money, and talent!) The details are mainly for my family, so I won't feel bad if you think it's a bit boring - just scroll down and see the cute pictures of Josh and a pickle. :)

But if you are a gardener and have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know!

Front of the house - facing East

See the polka-dots patches on our lawn? Cute. Hopefully in the next few weeks that will be lush grass. We are planning on expanding the flowerbed out to the right to the sidewalk. We'll put a small ornamental tree in the middle of that new section (in front of the porch), and some ground cover of some sort underneath it. We're taking out the junky bushes in the front bed and putting in some conical junipers that will eventually grow up to shade some of the window. I think I'll also put in some marigolds or other flowers.

Front of the house - North side

We're not quite sure what to do with this side of the house. It's kind of a worthless piece of land, usually shady and full of huge rocks. It's so narrow that we decided not to even fence it in. I'm thinking of just planting two lilac bushes on the edge of the sod in order to hide the cheaper grass behind it. (We don't want to waste money sodding it!)

Front of the house - South side

This is the side the gate is on. We're going to sod in front of it, but don't really have any other plans for this side of the house yet. I'd like to put a Colorado spruce somewhere there, but Lance doesn't like them. We'll see who wins.

Back of house - South side

I plan on putting my garden on this side of the house. It will get sun most of the day (this picture was taken late in the day). I may have part of the garden against the house and part of the garden against the fence, with a grass walkway in between. (Maybe we'll even spring for some stepping stones!) Yay! A real garden!

Back of house - facing Northeast

We're going to put sod on all of this part of the lawn. We'd like to have a swing set or a sandbox at some point back here.

Back of house - facing Southeast

We're sodding all of this area, too. But I would like to put in some raised flowerbeds along half of the fence on each side (meeting in the corner). Nothing too tall - maybe 6-12". Maybe a small ornamental tree at the end of each side, just to "cap" it for the eye. I really like Dogwoods, especially in the spring. I think this will all make for a good view out of our kitchen/dining area and living room windows.