Yard Work Progress!

Well today was a verrrrryyy productive day outside.  After sleeping in a bit (til about 9 haha), Peter and I had some breakfast and went outside to do some work.  Peter cut the grass and I did a whole lot of weeding in preparation for laying mulch.  Peter also cut down the pine tree in the corner of the back yard.  It was growing to close to the red bud tree and was being taken over by the hillside.  And he cut down the holly bush in the front yard.  I love holly bushes but it was too huge and in a very awkward spot.  We worked outside for roughly 5 hours and I couldn't be more pleased with the result:

We had already fixed up this area prior to today, minus the mulch.  We will probably be getting rid of the tall green shrub when we cut down trees eventually because it's dying.

This is the area that we've been working on.  I pulled out all the old stuff that was growing here and last weekend Peter turned over all the soil.  2 azaleas, 1 barberry and 1 basil plant later and this is what we have.  Plus the few lillies bit of phlox that was already growing there.  I also transplanted a columbine that was growing from the other side of the driveway to match the one that's growing on this side between the 2 lillies.  I'm going to move the lillies to the backyard after they bloom this year.

Here's a great picture of our grass that has grown in nicely.  It's already starting to really blend with the older grass too.  We used to have huge ornamental grasses here that I absolutely hated haha.

At the end of the driveway on the left side here I am going to finish digging up the things growing right now, turn over the soil and round it down to the driveway and plant grass.  I've pretty much divided up the landscaping work into sections and now that the first two are completed, this is the next section I want to tackle along with a small section on the right side near the road that has a bunch of junk growing in it that can't be seen from this picture.  I think the larger portion of the right side of the driveway will wait until fall when things start to die off.  We're just going to take everything out from there and plant grass as well.

This is where the holly bush used to be haha.  We're going to get rid of the stump and plant grass here as well.

A view from the porch:

I took this from the dining room window.  I am so happy with all of our hard work!

Our house as of today.  Love it!

We are really checking things off of our to do list for the yard.  When we cut down all the pine trees etc we'll be ripping up the one area in the middle of the yard and moving the rhododendron and salvaging the few flowers that grow there and moving them to other areas.  Planting grass is pretty much our theme.  We love pine trees too but there's just too much.  Everything is growing into each other and just going to get bigger.  Some day this summer I think a few friends will be coming down to help cut the trees down.  And we're looking into doing the hillside in the back ourselves with some friends sometime soon too.  It's exciting to see the great changes being made :)