Below is the picture that the previous owners had used in their original MSL listing. Unfortunately I never thought to take this picture myself before we started tearing up the hostas (the first change we made with the help of my MIL), so I only have this low res image that I downloaded from the web.
Besides the obvious paint color difference, the flowers they had were peonies, lilies and the overgrown hostas. The walkway was made up of a blueish gray slate that was obviously original to the house being built 12 years ago. They were all cracked and uneven. They also had planted two huge tree like shrubs that had overgrown and it was recommended to us to cut it down since it was so close to the foundation. We decided at that recommendation that we would not want any trees or shrubs in front of the house. They also lined their driveway with annuals but I wasn't about to worry about planting those every spring. We now have grass there!
This is what the house looked like about a year ago right after it was painted. You can see that we no longer had much in the way of shrubs and flowers. We had moved all the lilies on the side, lining the garage. We had plans to transplant the red maple and cut down the other tree.
This was taken the day that we moved the red maple last October. The other tree had already been cut down.
Redoing the walkway was always something we had wanted to do but because painting the house was the priority we continued to put Project Curb Appeal on the back burner. Our original plan was going to be to do the walkway this upcoming Fall but our neighbors ended up having an irrigation system put in and so while they were working over there we called to see if they could stop by and talk to us. He was really straight forward and easy to talk to and came by quite a few times to ask questions and take measurements. He presented us with a quote at the beginning of July and we crossed a few things off the list but decided to go with the majority of his plan!
Because we were not in a rush he did the first part of the project here ant here. First they had to dig up all our old perennials and shrubs (some were going to be used in the new plan and others were going elsewhere). Then he sprayed the area that had become infested with weeds that I had gotten lazy about keeping up with.
The next step was they came in and dug up the old walkway and raked up all the weeds. It was time to start mapping out where everything was going to eventually go.
Using an orange spray paint he came through and mapped out where each new perennial would be place and then placed my old shrubs and perennials where they would end up.
The kids were around when he was doing the spray painting so they asked him if he could write their names. He had only been around us for a few weeks but knew that Evan needed to have "crazy" in front of his name! Haha!
Now that it was all mapped out they could plug through and finish it all up. They started on Friday afternoon (in the rain!) lining the walkway, grading it, digging the drip edge, fixing the drywell we had put in last spring and placing all the perennials.
Then yesterday they were here for a good part of the day (yes on Saturday!) to get the pavers down and start planting.
All that was left was the finishing touches, adding mulch and sod and moving some irrigation heads. It looks gorgeous, and like I said it turned out better than I even imagined. Though I'm terrible about picturing how something is going to look. I tend to just trust the professionals!
Project Curb Appeal complete!
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