Category: House

As I am in the process of increas­ing curb appeal for the house to sell it next year, I’m final­ly mak­ing head­way on the aes­thet­ic improve­ments I’ve been want­i­ng to accom­plish since I got the house…it’s kind of annoy­ing to always have to wait until you want to sell a prop­er­ty to final­ly indulge on the stuff you always wanted…you see it on the HGTV shows all the time too. That nicer kitchen, that pret­ti­er yard, the nice toi­let. Too bad you your­self could­n’t enjoy it because more than like­ly the house you’re mov­ing into will have the same old­er stuff that you used to have.

Any­ways. Giv­en the heat (why is it always so HOT when I want to do yard­work???) I only man­aged to accom­plish about half of what I want­ed to do but hey, I got them done and I am proud of myself.

The back next to the patio, I want­ed to do step­ping stones lead­ing to the walk­out base­ment. Put those down about 2ish years ago? Or was it last year…either way half of it was sunk too far down and the weeds and grass had grown so far in it was like dig­ging the whole area up just like the first time…though I swear it was even hard­er than the first time. Thank­ful­ly it was hot, but not near­ly as hot as sum­mer­time usu­al­ly is. I’d always envi­sioned hav­ing creep­ing herbs or plants in between the steps so you could step on it and not have it die on you, nor would have to wor­ry about peb­bles or dirt pok­ing your foot (the grass back there, because it’s such harsh sun it the hard, spiky kind). So as you can see below, I plant­ed red creep­ing thyme which is sup­posed to be quite hardy stuff and sur­round­ed it with mulch because it’s so harsh back there. Ini­tial­ly, to keep costs down, I was just going to edge the grass around it, but I could see the mulch fly­ing every­where and also the weeds encroach­ing again, so I just put the paver bar­ri­er in (they ran out of stakes so I just used the land­scape pins). What I should have done was get sand so that the grass and weeds won’t get under­neath and into the mulch area, but I was hot and already spent way more mon­ey than I’d intend­ed. Also, I need­ed to dig the dirt out so that the mulch would sit below the stones and not flow down onto them, but once again I was super tired. End­ed up run­ning out of edger and man­aged to mis­count the num­ber of plants need­ed, but oh well. It still looks nice.

Here’s a before pic­ture and the after:

^You can also see in this pic­ture the 4 stones clos­est to the cam­era that I had to raise. I did­nt do a good job of clear­ing them of dirt but they were com­plete­ly grown over with grass on top of them hap­pi­ly thriv­ing. This is also the side I ran out to edg­ing and plants and even run­ning thin on mulch. The idea is for those plants to spread out (they grow up to a foot around) and cov­er it all in. They have a slight nice thyme scent too. Ined­i­ble and attracts bees (some were try­ing to check it out as I was plant­i­ng) but hope­ful­ly they thrive

The oth­er big­ger project turned out to be much eas­i­er than dig­ging up estab­lished grass. Just need­ed to spread the stone edge to the tree. Very minor and took me 30 min­utes at most. Now the mulch should stop flow­ing all over the place.