It's been a couple of months since an update so I wanted to take the opportunity to catch everyone up on what's been going on as well as show off some of our handy work. A few weeks ago I got the bug to start to redo the landscaping in the front of the house. The original landscaping job was done on the cheap and our place hasn't been quite up to snuff for the neighborhood (most of our neighbors have nice brick retaining walls, large mulch beds with lots of plants, etc).
It all started when I was out of town for work and came home to find that Dana had bought two nice flower boxes we had seen a week earlier at Target. I installed the flower boxes for her and just sort of kept going with it, I ripped all of the mulch out of the corner by our lonely little pine tree and extended that area down to the lawn by ripping out about a ton of rock. We then had about TWO TONS of moss covered boulders delivered and placed in the corner and by the tree ont he other side of the house. After all of that we planted a bunch of new plants including columbines, sage and a beatiful new Crimson King Maple tree (the new maple will eventually be 40 feet high which should really accent the house and balance things out). The new tree is a "super" tree which means that they grow it in a special plastic shell with air holes in it that naturally prune the roots and keep them growing straight.
I've also fixed our drainage problem by running an ABS extension off of our sump pump outlet all the way to the street. It might not be very pretty, but it's a lot better than having water pooling up in the corner of our lot.
All of the work took two weekends and several nights after work but we are happy with the results. There's more to do too, but that's for a later project.
