Living on the Edge(ing)

As I hinted in our last post, we started our first landscaping project over the weekend.  Saturday was a beautifully crisp late winter/early spring/spinter? day with blue skies and the sun shining to keep us warm (sorry Michigan folk... just look at the weather you could have if you all moved here *hint hint*).  We couldn't resist heading outside to work in our lackluster yard.  We started out back by raking up as many branches and sticks as we could, adding them to our ever growing pile, just waiting to be thrown into a glorious smore producing pyre.

nom nom nom...

Our spirits began to dampen in front at the dismal sight of our plain little box of a house with pretty much nothing going on in the way of curb appeal.  Sure, we love our little Cape Cod, but it has been long neglected and in desperate need of some love.  We visited a home and garden show a couple weekends ago and got a rough estimate on re-siding and a new portico, but that would run in the neighborhood of $10,000 for the siding and $8,500 for the portico... so obviously that's out of the question for a good long while.  Standing in our front yard, we decided we'd take a first small step by adding some edging stones along our "flower beds" surrounding the front of the house.

Our house looked a lot better last summer... still, it's pretty *yawn*

Naturally, we first visited our neighborhood Depot, but sadly, their in-stock selection of edging bricks was lacking.  Sure, they had those terrible concrete scalloped things, but in my opinion, those just look like you aren't even trying.  I had something more natural looking in mind that would play on the sort of cottage look of our house.

Boo!

So, the next stop was Lowe's, which I love sooo much more than the Depot due to the wider, brighter and cleaner aisles, much more helpful and knowledgable staff, better selection of appliances, and classier decor items... and there's a Krispy Kreme pretty much right next door.  Unfortunately, it's 10 miles away up a bad stretch that takes forever to get to.  Once we got there (of course reinvigorated with a Krispy Kreme sugar buzz), we quickly found what I had in mind and the super helpful landscape staff even loaded all 80 bricks into our car.  We were a little scared John's Escape wouldn't be able to handle the load, but it wasn't a problem at all.  It is built Ford Tough after all.

Our brick load.

We only had enough time to unload the car Saturday night, but went to bed excited to start first thing Sunday morning.  Of course it just had to rain pretty much all day Sunday, but we did manage to run out and dig some shallow trenches and stick a few bricks in.  Probably something I shouldn't have been doing while nursing a sinus infection, but I just couldn't help myself.  Luckily Monday was much nicer, so John worked on digging in the rest of the trench.  Once I got home at 5:30, we had just about half an hour before the sun sat to finish up, so we worked out a great system of me handing the bricks to John and he placed them in.  So we went from this...

Nakey plant beds.

*shudder*

To this:

Left side of the house outside our master bedroom.

Does anyone else see the ghost bichon in the window...?

There he is again!

We're both super happy how it turned out and how easy and relatively inexpensive the project was.  Our next step will be to re-mulch the beds (the stuff that's in there now looks way nastier in person) and then once we're comfortably past any chance of a freeze, we'll stick in some new flowers and maybe a couple more bushes.  The sod patches the contractors put in last summer seem to have no chance of revival, so we'll have to try re-seeding and hopefully end up with a nice patch of grass out front to greet friends and family.