front/backyard reno 2016

This summer, we had big plans for our front and backyard! We’ve had our house for a couple of years now and have had some time to think about what types of renovations we want to do. We were finally able to bring some of these ideas to light in our outdoor space. Apologies on the poor quality on some of these images, my phone didn’t seem to behave certain days.

This was pre-reno. The yard was in horrible shape. The bushes below the window torn our window screens and were slowly dying. I tired to save it by trimming it back a bit in the spring of 2015 because I read online that if you trim them, it helps, but it didn’t; I think these bushes were already too far gone. The other thing we didn’t like about them was it was too much green. We like colour and these bushes just didn’t do anything. Believe it or not, there’s also a rose bush in there, to the left of the door. These bushes were sucking up all the sunlight and nutrients that the rose bush was also dying. Once we pulled them out, the rose bloomed like crazy! Spring 2017, we’re planning on transplanting it to the side of the house because it’s getting in the way of the door and we have other ideas on what to do with the flower bed.

Another big change that happened was we removed the “grasses” in the flower beds. Again, we wanted colour and the grasses just didn’t work.

So, how’d we get rid of the bushes? We rented a saw from the Home Depot Rental department. Honest to God, we would have been there all weekend had we not done this. We had to use a combination of a saw and an axe to get the darn roots out! Once we got it out, we celebrated by taking a photo of the root. Marcio was super happy when we finally got it out. I’m “crying” because the stupid branches were itchy and we had to carry them to the backyard for waste prepping another day. You can see all the waste these bushes created. Our backyard did not look pretty for a couple of weekends.

Once we got rid of the waste, it was time to finish cleaning up the backyard for the summer and plant the annuals we bought. We got all our plants this summer from the Home Depot Garden Center. We realized after we got them that we probably should have spent a bit more and bought perennials instead, but we didn’t know exactly how we wanted to decorate the yard yet, so we just went with that so the flower bed wasn’t empty all summer.

This final photograph was how the yard ended up looking once we got rid of all the stuff we didn’t want. It’s much cleaner and colourful. We also added some new soil to the beds as they were looking quite low and the plants just took off!

Now that the summer season is gone, we have a better idea of what we want to do with the yard next summer and have a better plan on how we’re going to do it.