Fourth of July

Thankfully the weather has been extremely cooperative this summer so we're managing to get quite a bit done on the outside while we can! I took a few vacation days the week of July 4th and had a few big projects planned out. My main goal was to get the two large beds at the front of the house laid out, cleaned out and at least mulched. I figured it would take about 4 days, and that ended up being more or less right on...

BEFORE: East Side

I'd laid out the mowing strip on the East side of the walk a while ago using reclaimed concrete pavers that we found in various miscellaneous places around the property. Not the most glamorous material, but free! The bed was still overgrown with volunteer weeds and a ton of ferns. The ferns were probably fine when there used to be a big tree here: 

FEBRUARY 2011

(Hard to believe that's what it looked like a mere 6 months ago!)

Anyway without the trees the bed gets sun most of the day, and that meant that the ferns were turning brown and generally not looking all that great. Not to mention that the bed was still overrun with ivy and other miscellaneous weeds. It just needed to be completely ripped out and cleaned up!

Took the better part of a day to rip out the weeds and re-mulch. Luckily we had all of the trees turned into wood chips so we've got a pretty BIG pile of free mulch to use! The following weekend I headed out to Ashcombe's and Stauffers and picked up a few initial perennials to at least get a bit of color in the beds. Not even close to being enough o fill in the space, but at least a start for this year!

AFTER: East Side with new plantings and fresh mulch.

 Next up was the West side of the house. That bed was a bit larger and a bit more of a mess!

BEFORE: West Side

All sorts of issues here! There really wasn't any defined shape to the bed. The entire area had been covered with English Ivy (my nemesis!) which had been mowed just prior to this photo. The trellis that wraps around the house is in need of repair, and the corner column was overgrown with more ivy (English and poison!). The other complicating factor is that the yard slopes down and away from the inside corner where the porch and the house meet and then back up as you go around the side of the house. (The lowest point would be in the bottom right corner of the picture.) The challenge was to come up with a plan to define the bed without making it look like it was sinking. 

DURING

The answer seemed to be to create a short retaining wall to visually raise the corner of the bed to that from the street it would appear level. Thankfully I was able to secure some recycled wall blocks from Dan and Jo that were just perfect for the project. Because of the slope the wall is actually only 1" high at the sidewalk and then steps to 3 blocks high (about 18") in the corner. This is a shot of the wall installation in progress AFTER the bed was cleared of weeds and ivy. (And after I'd already gotten my second bad case of poison ivy for the summer.) And the final product as seen from the front pond looking back to the East:

AFTER: East Side

This was my fist attempt at retaining wall construction, and though obviously not the most COMPLICATED project ever, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out, especially with the challenges of needing to keep the wall level and deal with the change in grade. I think it turned out pretty nice and it definitely gives the bed much needed structure. This photo also shows the now newly painted corner post all cleared of debris and the repair to the front trellis span. Just a couple of rose bushes and one false indigo bush planted for now. More next year!

The other part of the project was the reworking of the basement window well:

BEFORE

 This is the only accessible window in the basement, and is where the secondary (and tertiary) sump pumps need to discharge during times of extreme basement flooding. Hence the black pipe. The problem was that at some point they decided to barricade the window by making a huge dirt mound directly in front of it and covering that with random bricks and concrete pavers. Eventually that got taken over by ivy and weeds resulting in a big mess, and a cave in every time the window needed to be open. That may have been ok, but to make the mound they basically just dug out in front of the mound which meant that the planting bed had a huge hole which just collected water which subsequently made it into the basement.

I decided to use the same recycled wall block in combination with a regular window well to create a new enclosure.

AFTER

Took a bit of tweaking, but the blocks pretty much hide the plastic window well and since they are the same blocks that were used for the retaining wall, it all blends together nicely.

By the end of the weekend I was pretty sore and itchy (thanks to poison ivy), but pleased with the new look:

Happy Birthday America!