Weekend Project

We've made a list of some projects that will help us finally complete our home transformation.  It's nothing that desperately needs to be done since we moved into a renovated home, but it's some personal preference things that we'd really like to accomplish this year.

-Fence in our backyard
-Tidy up the landscaping
-Put a fireplace behind our garage
-Finish our family room (I am sooo impatient for this one.)  This includes purchasing artwork, curtains, and a recliner.
-Finish up curtains in some random rooms like the unused living room, small kitchen window, and Arya's second small window.

The fence installers will be here Thursday so we'll get to cross that off the list.  And this weekend we got to cross a little bit of the landscaping off the list.

I think I've mentioned before that before we moved in the renovators planted a bunch of new grass seed.  Since we moved in in January we really didn't know what it would look like.  Unfortunately a lot of it didn't grow so we ended up with a pretty patchy yard, but it works for now and we want to wait until next spring to fix it when the temps are lower.
But one spot in particular really bothered me.  They did really well making our front door and walkway look nice, most likely assuming that's the door people would use.  However, we use the side door, and the spots on both sides of the steps was an eyesore.  It was really sandy soil and it's almost always shaded so nothing but weeds grew there.

It seemed like a small enough task to handle and I thought it'd be a quick project I could do on my own.  I was wrong.  It wasn't horrible, but it definitely took me way longer than I thought the first day.  Thankfully I had some help the second day :)  I dug up all the weeds and moved some dirt around and it looked something like this one both sides.

We decided for now just to lay some mulch down.  I'm going to wait until the end of summer mark downs and get some big pots so i'll be able to put some potted plants for decoration next year.  We laid down the mulch and then lined it with marble rocks to try an even out the mulch meeting the pavement.  It looks so much nicer and makes a lot bigger difference than I thought it would when walking into our home.

The finished product