ground zero(ish).

over the weekend, we kept chugging along towards our end goal of having pretty flowerbeds sometime this year. we had a few distractions, challenges, miscommunications, and setbacks along the way, but for what was maybe the first time EVER, we were able to roll with it without any major meltdowns (ok maybe just one minor one) and still turn out a pretty impressive weekend's worth of work.

 

just as a reminder: this is where we were coming from when it came to our front flower beds: pretty much just a giant monster bush and a bunch of weeds.

 

 

by early afternoon on Saturday, we had made it to this point: the monster bush had been cut down. a metric ton of river rocks had been picked out of the bed, along with probably 5 metric tons of small decorative boulders. trips had been made to the landfill, the mall, and Lowes, and i had wasted about 4 hours sitting waiting for mark's car to get its oil changed and brake pads replaced.

 

the rest of the day Saturday, Mark battled the monster stump of the monster bush, while i raked all the weeds out of the rest of the bed, mowed the grass, did some laundry, and made dinner.

in the end, with a lot of hard work and a little help from his dad's truck, Mark was victorious over the stump.

by the time we got the stump out, the hole filled, and everything cleaned up, it was time to go inside, eat dinner, chill out on the couch, and watch the O's game.

 

Sunday was mulch day. to steal the eloquent words of Ron Burgundy: mulch mulch mulch. i love mulch. we got a whole truckload from the landfill for a whopping $10. 

 

in an attempt to hopefully keep the weeds at bay, we used landscape fabric underneath the mulch. one roll covered both front beds with some extra to spare.

it took me a while to get a good handle on the best process for mulch spreading, but i finally settled on using the pitchfork to load the wheelbarrow, a shovel to distribute the mulch, and a garden rake to spread it evenly. and then in less time than i thought, we had mostly empty, freshly mulched front flower beds!

welcome to ground zero: there's nowhere to go but up from here.

 

surprisingly, that's not all we were able to squeeze into our weekend: we also took care of a couple other spaces that were not on our original to-do list.

 

bonus project #1: a bigger fire pit area in the backyard. while Mark was accidentally locked out of the shed while i had his car and the key to the shed at the shop on Saturday, he took the decorative boulders i had picked out of the flower beds and used them to spruce up our little fire pit.

 

its probably not the forever solution for this space, and obviously the rest of the backyard is still in need of a lot of love, but this little upgrade is a nice starting point for this area. hopefully it will also be enough of a kick-in-the-pants type of motivation to keep our outdoor upgrades going so we will hit this area sooner rather than later. i'm already looking forward to bonfires and cookouts and really enjoying our backyard this summer.

 

bonus project #2: a new front yard flower bed. after the front beds were done, we still had some landscape fabric and mulch leftover. so Mark took it upon himself to create a mulched area around the rosebush in the front yard.

 

we didnt have quite enough fabric to cover the whole area, so we opted to use what we had under the rosebush, to hopefully minimize the amount of weeding that will need to be done in under those thorny branches. (i took a thorn to the index finger on Sunday during the one part of the day i opted not to wear my gloves. not fun.)

we used every last bit of the mulch pile to fill this space - down to the very last half of a wheelbarrow-full. we couldnt have planned it more perfectly if we had tried, so i'm kind of glad we didnt waste any time trying to calculate just the right amount of mulch or just the right size of bed. Mark just eyeballed it to try and have it look decent and be easier to mow around. success!

oh, see that nasty looking tree in the background that is eating the OTHER front corner of the house? dont worry. its already on the list.