B&A - Garage Flower Bed

That is B & A, as in Before and After, not BA, as in Bare Ass. We don't do BA's around here so get your head out of the gutter!

On to the B&A...

I think, maybe, just possibly, the little area in front of the garage is finally officially finished now! YAYYYYY!!!!

1 down, 3,796,241 to go!

I mentioned it a little in this post last fall. It was the third project that I finished last weekend, officially classifying me as a total rock star for how productive I was. The other two projects were The Great Clipper Encounter 2009 and getting the closet in my office/craft room painted and organized.

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the real before, how it was when we bought the house. I'm discovering that I do that a lot. It's annoying.

When I got started on it it had a huge and very dead rose bush with massive, evil thorns. It was huge. And evil. It took a lot of very careful pruning to extract. Then I pulled out the huge, mostly dead juniper shrubby thing. It had completely over grown the area and over hung the little fence border by a good foot or more. It was ugly. This picture was taken after pulling all that stuff out. There was plastic covering the whole area and the little fence in the back was the border around the whole edge.

I worked on it a little last fall, got it "done" but then decided that I really wasn't satisfied with the way it looked. I wanted to add dirt to it, bring it up level to the concrete and re-do the rock border.

I talked the boyfriend into pulling out the juniper root finally a little while ago and he turned up the dirt a bit while he was there. Last weekend I pulled the rock border out and got him to bring a couple scoops of the good horse poo dirt out for me to add in and got to work re-doing the rock border.

This was what I ended up with. Much better!

I still wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to plant in there so I decided to think on it for a while and see what ended up inspiring me. I'm a big fan of low maintenance when yard work is involved so that was a big consideration. There are big, pretty green leafy bushes that seem to grow and spread pretty fast and don't need watering in front of the house so I decided to pull up some of the shoots and transplant them over there. They should fill in pretty quickly and then we can just snip it back to keep behaving itself in it's little area.

Then I hit Home Depot for paint and supplies for the office and found these cute little flowers that are also supposed to be low maintenance, spread out to form a mat and bloom all spring. Plus, they were on sale and I do loooove sales! I think I would have gotten them even if they weren't on sale though. They were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Only cuter!

Aren't they cute? I think they are adorable little flowers!

So after adding the bushes and the little flowers to the area, this is the finished product...

Everything should fill in and grow together eventually. The leafy bush should grow quite tall, the one in front of the house is going on 5 feet tall. They also get cute little white flowers on them late spring. I really like the way it turned out!

So YAY finished yard project #1! Not sure what's next outside, but hoping to get after pics of the office by next weekend! Finger's crossed.