My, Oh My

Over the weekend, Justin and I attempted to tackle another home improvement project. This time, it was the landscaping! The weather was just too gorgeous not to be outside!

I started working on it Wednesday night by trimming up the shrubs. On Friday night, we finally mowed our cow pasture of a yard. (Yes---we are already mowing down here!) I then raked out all of the mulch and pulled out all of the brick that the previous owners had put in. Justin and I are taking one side of the house at a time. The easiest part is between the garage and the front door where the landscape is surrounded by the sidewalk. The previous owners of the house had dug a small trench along the sidewalk and sat the bricks up on the small side. What a horrible idea!? Every time you would bump them, they fell over, and we were constantly picking them up!

On Saturday, it was off to find landscaping bricks! Now, you would think that since I live in a state where rock and such seems to be abundant, finding this sort of thing would be easy, right? WRONG! We went to Home Depot first (only because I had a coupon) and they had maybe two choices. Then it was off to Lowe's who didn't have the greatest selection, but at least more to choose from. We had taken a brick with us and tried to match it as best as we could, and finally were able to decide on one. So...here we go...loading up these landscape bricks onto a cart. Please remember that these thing weigh almost 30 lbs. each! Then we load them into the car and are on our way home to begin our new weekend project.

Luckily, we didn't unload all of the bricks! We laid out a few and both agreed that these were going to have to be returned. When we got the bricks up against the house, the color clashed! Now, we knew that we weren't going to find an exact match, but we were both hoping for something of a closer match than what we had. So, it's back to Lowe's where we get to load all of these bricks (AGAIN!) back onto the cart. Needless to say, our project is now on hold!

On Sunday, we went out again, attempting to find a place that sold landscape bricks. Now, if you're looking for just plain old brick...you can find that in all sorts of colors and sizes...but not the nice landscaping brick. I'm sure that there are places in Nashville, but probably not within our budget! After looking at a few different places, I told Justin that I was just about ready to learn how to mortar! On a whim, we stopped at Lowe's in the town 10 miles north of us and low and behold, they have a MUCH better selection than the store in our town. We pick out two different styles and buy one of each to take home and compare against the brick. No way am I going to go through that load/unload process again until we find "THE ONE," and I think we have a winner!

Here's where we're out right now...we ended up laying the bricks down on their long side in the trench to help make a level surface to lay the new landscaping bricks on. Either way, we have over 100 bricks stacked up on the side of the house, and we haven't even pulled the back and other side of the house yet...we need to find something to do with some of them! At least it looks better now than what it did before!

The other side of the house is going to be a challenge as we are going to have raise up the landscaping bed. The current landscaping there slopes down with the yard, and it drives me crazy. Not to mention, that right now, it just looks plain ugly! Again...I don't know what the previous owners were thinking!

The other challenge we have ahead of us is the landscaping in the front of the yard around the trees. UG-LY!!! Notice all of the tulips coming up....yeah...they just threw them there, the bulbs aren't even buried under any soil. The good news is that hopefully I'll be able to salvage them and reuse them in other parts of the landscaping!

Needless to say, we are not where we were hoping to be with the landscaping! I will show you the only thing that I did get accomplish this weekend, and that was getting the ferns up!