Hooray, hooray, hooray a Before & After is here! It has been quite a while since I have posted Before & After pics, so I am very happy to share our front yard transformation (though the front room and TV room were both started before and have yet to be completed…) But back to the good news!

This weekend we cleaned up before I snapped some pics yesterday afternoon when the sun was shining. Our house had actually gotten SUPER dirty with all the dust being kicked up from our grass removal, french drain building and crazy planting so we brought out the power washer and gave it a hose down

Our cars also got a nice hose down because they were similarly filthy. Especially Chris’ truck. I think it had been a year plus since his car got a good bath

Those bright yellow spots are where he’d already hosed, and the brown…well, that’s about 74 layers of dirt. After his truck got washed we put the truck top back on and he was finally able to park his car back in the driveway for the first time in about 2 months

And then there was that shit pile

Now, before you get excited thinking that we disposed of it all, I’ll crush your dreams: we did not. Instead, I just moved it to another spot out view. Duh

And that, my friends, was the last item on my to do list before I waited patiently for the sun to poke out of the clouds yesterday so I could take the AFTER pics. YAY!!!!

Of course, for there to be an after, we must first visit the before. Here she blows, right when we got her

And now my amazingly fantabulous readers, he she glows today

Hooray!!!! Seriously, I fucking love our front yard. It meets all the requirements we asked Wendy to think about when I dragged her into designing it: LOW MAINTENANCE, DROUGHT TOLERANT, NO GRASS. Although we were always certain of those requirements, I was really afraid that our yard was going to look ugly, but how could I have ever doubted the amazing design skills of my fabulous step mom?

The following before shots are taken from all different times we’ve been slowly working – some building the raised bed, working on the drain, removing the grass. So forgive me if all the before’s don’t look like they’re taken anywhere near the same time as each other. They’re not.

Why hello ripped up driveway and partially dead grass

Helllooooo beautiful coral bark and pretty paver driveway

I am glad to forget the ginormous dirt pile

And now stare at a pretty raised bed full of pretty flowers

I think we can all agree that plywood over trenches is not a very welcoming walkway

But our stone paver walkway and mosaic planters are a wonderful way to say welcome

And of course there was the porch when we moved in: the weird step everyone tripped on and the hollow core front door that swung the wrong way and was about 4″ too short so you could poke your toe under it

And now?

And here are some more angles that I just loved lots and lots

Ahhhhhh, it is so nice to be able to call this project DONE! I love our yard so so so so much. It certainly took a lot to get there – killing our grass, digging a ton of trenches in our yard and installing drainage, weed blocking the yard, the first and second round of planting, finishing up our walkway and putting our mosaic planters in place that we made ourselves, making a bench pretty, ripping out the small weird step and repainting and laying bricks in the porch, and installing the home’s original gate. There were a bunch of other projects, but that’s really all the links I felt like boring you all with

Just one more look at that after

Ahhhhhhh.

Okay, now time to go fall over.