Outdoor Projects

Earlier this summer, before the horrible heat of July and August, we were able to get some nice projects done in our yard and on our porch.  We're pretty happy with how they all turned out!

We first got some sod which was on sale.

Tony put the sod in our front yard down the two barren flower beds alongside our front walk. They looked so good when they were done. Unfortunately, the extra dry summer has made some of it look quite brown. I'm sure the lawn will look fabulous next year when it has had a year to settle in. We also filled in a few places in the backyard that had been flower beds. I like a nice open expanse of lawn.

The "before" pic

Next we bought some nice perennials and redid a section of our back garden by the dining area. It had been struggling for a few years no matter what we tried to do. I planted the flowers and Tony placed the mulch. All summer these flowers have been doing very well! They have grown and blossomed.

Another project that we did outside was to repaint our porch and add color to the trim of our house, which previously had just been white.  Tony has wanted to have a blue-ceilinged porch for years. So, if that was something he truly wanted, who am I to question it?  There is a long tradition of porch ceilings being painted blue. You can read about it here.

This is a picture of the ceiling after the men had scraped the old peeling paint off and started to cut in the blue paint.

We also took the opportunity to also install a porch ceiling fan which we highly recommend to anyone! We have loved it. It has a remote control in the house so we can turn it on and off while we are inside, and no dangly chains keep hitting us in the head.

Here is the finished product! It's a little different, but we like it a lot. Very happy with the results!

We had planted some blackberry and raspberry plants last year which were very small and we didn't know whether they would grow or not. They made it through the winter and decided to give us some nice berries before the July heat did the rest of the berries in. The blackberry plants are still a little spindly, but the raspberries are kind of going crazy. Tony repurposed some trellises we had in the back and made a nice home for the blackberries. They are still getting used to creeping around them, but next year should be great.

Here are some pics of the project and other parts of our yard.

Our beautiful, old hydrangea bush

Some of the mulching Tony did .
You can see the results of our sod as well (no ugly flower beds lining the walk)

Installing the trellises.
You can also see the new color of the trim around the windows.

Bountiful berries!

This man loves berries!

Pretty flowers in the front yard