A few months ago, while my husband was off on family leave, we tackled a few projects around the house. Yes, in between not sleeping much at night, we worked on projects! One of the biggest ones was updating our front yard garden bed.
Ever since we had to move our fence back off the street, the sprinklers were no longer in the proper place to water the grass efficiently and the area in front of the fence had trouble thriving because it got walked on by people from the elementary school across the street. So we wanted to cover the area with bark and put in a few plants in hopes of giving the house a little more curb appeal as well as try to keep people off of our yard. Who were we kidding, people still walked through our yard but at least we no longer had to look at patches of dead grass! Plus since we knew that we would be renting out our house soon, we needed to have the sprinklers properly set up.
We were really happy with how it turned out. The front yard has not gotten the same love it has had in the past with this whole having a baby thing and California's continued drought. So the new garden bed looks really manicured and sort of hides my neglected garden in the main yard area.
I am not sure if this is common in other areas, but a lot of homes in our neighborhoods are opting for more drought friendly gardens. We felt like this was a nice compromise without going completely bare.
We planted boxwood plants all the way down the front and side of our house. We added in a few more oleanders to match the existing ones on the side.
It took a good couple of weeks to do the whole project, mostly because Brent had to rerun sprinklers. But once we got to planting and laying down bark it went really quickly. We felt like the clean and uniform look added a bit of a wow factor for not a ton of money. Looking back at all the years of picking out plants and moving things around, if I were to do it all over again, I would go with a more simple look like this. A good lesson as life seasons and my how my taste for curb appeal has changed.
