Beautifying the Outside

Is beautify even a word? You know, I'm an English teacher and I still had to look it up; I don't want to look like a fool after all. 

Anyways, as you can tell, the topic of this post is about the outside. This past weekend my boyfriend and I worked on landscaping the front yard. Steve (the BF) actually did a lot of the grunt work a week beforehand. I got home from work and the front garden area was all weeded and the rocks were dug up. Yup, you heard me right, rocks, and lots of them.

There they are, well, one pile at least. Right now they are just sitting on the edge of our property. These rocks are a pain in the rear and I feel like they are never ending.

The next step was to go shopping! Normally, I'm not a shopper...I HATE it! But when it comes to the house, I LOVE it. Steve and I went to Home Depot and bought one pink rose bush, two pink bougainvillea shrubs, one pink azalea shrub, and seven decorative grasses called Cordyline. Our goal was to get plants that had heart and could survive through any hardness that was thrown at them. Did we do it? Beats me but I'll let you know when I find out. As for now, they are getting water every day; that's a start, right?

Above is the finished product, and I can't wait for them to fill out. The lighting isn't great because I'm not able to get a picture of them till at least 3:30. This weekend, I'll have to try and take a better one earlier in the day with some close ups on the plants.

I don't have a great before picture (when we did this I wasn't blogging). Below is the best picture I could find. 

It's a little far away but you can see there were some unevenly spaced bushes that were there before our transformation. We ended up transplanting them to the side of the house, which is the next step on our outside project list. It's not pretty right now. See for yourself.

Ewww, gross. Shield your eyes and turn away. I hate looking over here but I can't wait to make it pretty like the front.

Stay tuned for more. Next up, maybe I'll talk about the ants that are haunting my dreams thanks to our landscape project.

P.S. It's my goal to post every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Let's see if I can stick to it. Cross your fingers and wish me luck!