Landscaping Fun

There's nothing that makes you feel more like a grown-up than treating your lawn with mole/gopher repellant.  Especially when you shake your fist yelling, "And stay out!"  In addition to implementing Phase 1 of de-mole-ing the yard, Eric and I began what will be the long and arduous process of landscaping!  I didn't include an outdoor to-do list in my last post, so here's what I left out:

• Kill the ivy!!
• Today we clipped the ivy at the root, but we didn't pull it off of the side because we didn't want to hurt the brick.  Once it was all severed, we sprayed the roots with herbicide.  When it dies we'll yank it all up!

 

 

 

• Contain the gravel drive way, get rid of the weeds growing up in the rocks.  While the gravel driveway seems innocent enough from the front, in the back it is covering the entire yard.  We'd like to take up the gravel in the back and plant grass. 
• Border the driveway with brick or some kind of paving stone
• Build a carport next to the house.  Ideally, we would like this carport to look similar to the house (same roof and style).  We've even thought about somehow connecting the two so that you can walk straight from your car to the back porch without being exposed to the elements.  We would love to incorporate a shed into the carport as well.

 

 

 

• Pull up ugly/unnecessary plants and bushes.  We would like the yard to be as flat, grassy and uniform as possible, with clean and simple bushes/flowers closer to the house/back patio

 

 

 

 

•  Make the back patio a comfortable space to entertain and enjoy! I don't have much of a vision for outdoor spaces, so I'm going to let Eric and my brother take the reins on this one.  All I can see in this space's future is a grill, a fire pit, and some benches.  How bad could that be?!
• On the right side of this picture you can see the back "stoop" with the stairs on the left (you can't really see those) leading up to the back door.  We would like to enclose this back porch with a railing and build stairs going down the right side that could eventually lead to the carport.

 

 

Here are a couple of before and after pictures to show you what we did today!

 

 

Although it's hard to detect in these pictures because of the way the light is hitting in the first picture, we removed 4 huge rhododendron bushes on the left side of the driveway plus tons of ivy and brush.  Here are a couple play-by-plays...

 

Eric sawed while I hauled the branches to the side of the road, where they will magically disappear on Thursday, thanks to the wonderful City of Hendersonville!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also taped up samples of a range of colors we are considering painting the exterior:

 

 

We tried getting a sample can of our beloved "Spanish Moss" (we talked about that here), but we found out that the smallest amount of that particular color we could get would be a whole gallon.  And at about $40 per gallon, we just decided to pick out a paint chip that was pretty close (the one on the top).  We like it!  We also picked out 2 lighter colors to compare.

What paint color do you like the best?

 

-Sal