Changes to the Outside of our Home

Even though I have been laid up all summer with my left knee work has been done on the grounds around the house.  Richard has picked up the slack (even though he hates gardening) and pulled out plants, dug gardens, planted new plants etc.  So here are a few pictures of before and after of the outside of our home.

 

The front of the house on the left side had these ceders growing they are now gone.  The window well had been updated and we have added two dogwood shrubs with the wood that turns red in the winter either side of the window well.  The picture of the front of the house partially in the shade but hopefully you can see where these changes have been made.

 This is the north side of the house where there once was a very large spruce tree which we had removed.  Richard is slowly removing as many of the surface roots from that tree as possible in the mean time we have added 18 ground covers; 3 ivy, 4 creeping jenny, 3 black bugle and 4 rainbow bugle, and 4 periwinkle.  We have been told that all these plants like shade and do well in the acidic soil that the spruce trees make.  We still have 3 very large spruce trees on this side so no changing of the soil anytime in the future.

 



This is from last year early in the summer and Richard clearing the over grown white lilac.












 This is the same area in the spring this year.







This is how it looks at the moment.  Michelle and I removed the majority of the stones from around the pond.  Richard dug the whole area and placed ground fabric down ready for the rocks to be placed back around the pond, redesign the waterfall (next years project I would think).  We planted two virginia creepers and will make holes in the fabric so they can spread and cover the area as the years go by.  We also want to place some kind of structure for the virginia creepers to climb to have a height feature here. 

The ornamental cherry that has be designed to weep, I took time to prune the branches that were beginning to grow upwards.  This tree now has about a foot or more of the branches spreading out on the ground so I'll probably cut those back.

Richard plans to make some sort of seat out of this so using the old radiator as a garden feature.  This was the radiator we purchased but found out it leaked so is not usable.  We think it will make a great feature on the back patio.






I was hoping to do before and after pictures but it didn't work out so well.  Things have been done outside even though Richard hates doing this type of work.  Many thanks to him though because I was getting very frustrated with not being allowed to do the work myself.  I have lots of plans as we move ahead with the garden but it will take many years to do all the work.

Richard took the time to clean out all the eaves-trough so hopefully the water will run down the drain pipes now instead of overflowing as it has want to do in the past.  Obviously this is a yearly task because there are a lot of trees in this area besides all the ones in our garden.