Curb appeal Before and After

My parents came over this week to help me do a whole lot of work on the front yard.  The success of the "growing grass" experiment has had amazing results so I'm taking it a step further with a 50 pound bag of grass seed.... drought resistant :)  We'll see if it really works but I'm watering it like mad.

If you remember the awful part of what I was dealing with and what it looks like now you can't see a better result!

 

And after a whole lot of work and a whole lot of pain in my back/legs/arms/shoulders 

 I'm going to paint the bench black though.  And I really want to put a fountain to the right and a lamp post behind it. . . .but I'm kind of out of money for a little bit....

 Hopefully the seed I planted will grow some grass in this dead spot where I've killed off a ton of weeds.

 Think Google Street View would replace their image with this one?

 Front flower bed - I have a garden gnome I plan on putting in there somewhere.  We stole it from someone's yard when we were in high school.  I fully expect that if I put it in the garden that someone will steal it.  I embrace this and welcome it.

 Flagstone patio with bench and side flower bed.

 ooooo new grass.... ooooo ahhhhhh and its all soft too!

 New shutters!

 Awesome house numbers with one of my favorite fonts ... a little art deco a little modern a lot fabulous!

Other potential additions to the yard include:
The big foot statue from the SkyMall catalog

 

Or maybe Roswell the Alien Sculpture

Maybe a solar birdbath/fountain (my friend Jacque says I have to have a fountain not a birdbath because of mosquitoes)

There are actually a lot of options for solar outdoor fountains.  And solar lamp posts... I highly recommend this - particularly if you're too cheap to pay for the electrician to come out and install some kind of outdoor outlets.

Yard Work Project From Hell

When the appraiser came through to look at the house before we did any work the first thing he said was that our back yard and in general front yard looked pretty rough. Not just because we have a garage that is literally falling down - but the back yard looks like someone could get lost and perhaps die from carnivorous plants.



So this is what I'm dealing with here.... It's pretty bad. I didn't take a picture of the back side of the garage where I'd found that my grandfather had been hoarding stuff ... and a family of opossums had built a nest.

After six days of raking leaves that hadn't been raked in probably 10 years, cutting down small trees that had grown just a little taller than I am from seeds falling out of other trees - and generally thinning out the poison ivy and various other weeds and whatnot.

Here's what I've got now.