Summer Projects: Outside Work

Now that the interior of our house is finished, we've been slowly turning to worrying about things outside.  I think next summer if we can afford it we'd like to have the house painted, and then...I don't know what we'll do!  It'll be nice to some day not have remodeling to do.  I guess at that point we'll be ready to move.  Ha!

So, in addition to painting the exterior doors, I also did trimwork white.  I also painted the garage door again.  We don't have the money to replace it and the bottom is really rough, but new paint helps.  

We didn't do this, but it's new...I came home from the gym yesterday, and the landlord next door cut down the tree that hung over the top of our fence!  I hate it.  I feel like I have less privacy now!

We put a sealer on the deck.  It's colorless so you can't tell.  But Kyle was able to knock that out in one afternoon.

More gravel in the driveway to keep the weeds down!  If I'd have known gravel was so stinkin' cheap, we would have done this forever ago.  I figured it was so expensive so I never bothered to price anything.  Oh well...looks better now!  We've had issues with weeds in the driveway like crazy because when we moved in, we laid gravel over grass WITHOUT putting down landscape fabric or edging it initially.  We were young and stupid and inexperienced at owning a home and we will NEVER make that mistake again.

We did a lot of landscaping around our house that I didn't take pictures of because it's mostly the same as the other years.  However, we invested some more money this year and bought perennial flowers so hopefully there's less to do next year.

We are lazy gardeners.  I hate weeding and digging to plant flowers.  Pathetic, I know.  So we've been putting our plants into metal containers with holes drilled in the bottom.  I like it because we can move them around and we can even take our plants with us when we move!  We bought a large horse trough from Rural King that measures 2 feet tall, 2 feet wide, and 6 feet long to put alongside our garage so we can begin a garden next year at the right time.  Usually when April rolls around and everyone is putting in a garden, I'm stuck grading all kinds of essays and making finals.  We don't get to gardening until the end of May, and our gardens are always pitiful because they're late or they always got washed out.  So, with this horse trough ready to go for next year in our garage, we hope that next year's summer might yield a small, decent garden for us.  We'll try!