Hoping for Another Lovebug: Show and Tell #3

Yard work -- a before and after story.

I should preface my photos with a note that I do not like to do yardwork. I love flowers and I'm envious when I see other people's flower gardens, but I'll never have one because I just don't enjoy the work enough. And that's why after living in our house for 6 years the flower beds in the back the house were completely overgrown with random flowers and mostly weeds. My few attempts to spruce things up usually involved mums or petunias, many random flower pots, and a half refinished ice cream table and chair set. The result was that our yard look like it belonged on the set of the Bev.erly Hillbillies. My older sister (who now lives in an apartment in NYC) used to have the most beautiful yards. She never had tons of flowers, but always roses and great shrubs. So I recently asked her for some advice on something nice looking but low maintenance that I could do to spruce up our yard. She ended up giving me more than advice. She brought my nephew down and spent two days with me -- including 3 visits to the garden center and many, many hours of digging (thanks to the practically solid clay that is what passes for soil here and crazy BIG root systems in the flower beds right next to the house). The focus of our work was along the back of our house and our patio, but I got so excited we did a little sprucing up in the front too. She also convinced me to get rid of the old ice cream table and chair set and most of the pots -- my husband is eternally grateful! I actually have a few other projects planned for the fall (with specific instructions given by my sister!) and I'm so happy with the results of our recent efforts that I'm actually excited. The effort paid off in another unexpected way too. We have no real storage for things like bikes, lawn mowers, yard tools, etc, so our screened porch is unusable because it's where we put everything. Seeing the effort we put into the yard my mom decided to give us a rather large sum of money to be used for a shed. It arrives on Wednesday and we're so excited to get the use of our porch back. Anyway back to the recent project... Unfortunately, I don't have true "before" photos, because I forgot to pull out my camera until after I had dug up all the junk growing in the beds AND dug up the ugly railroad ties and many many ugly and crumbling bricks used as borders. and I'm actually , and Nevertheless, here's more of the story in pictures.

Behind the Patio