Between the rainy days, we’ve had some really lovely days and I’ve been getting out to do work in the garden to take advantage of them.  I’m excited about getting more work done in the house, but it’s just such a disaster right now (with the kitchen renovation happening) that I find myself either painting in the studio or working outside in the garden.  Both have been a nice retreat from the dust, noise, and clutter. The garden has also been a source of discovery and excitement as things are coming to life and revealing themselves.  Some hostas have popped up in the back along the neighbor’s fence and I added a few variegated ones that were given to me by a neighbor.  I was able to get this area weeded, planted, and mulched at a very small cost since most of the plants were free. I bought some lavender

When we had the bushes removed from the front and the pine and holly trees removed, it made the house much more visible.  That is what we wanted, but now the things we need to work on (like power washing and painting) are a bit more prominent and the porch looks a little naked.  I stuck a couple of antique concrete planters (that belonged to my Oma) when we first moved in, but the porch definitely needed more.  The thing is, it’s a shallow porch, so furniture isn’t going to work.  It just needed some greenery to spruce it up. I had faux boxwood topiaries on the porch of our MN house, but with all of the weight in the planters, it seemed like it would be best not to move them and I ended up selling them with the house.  As soon as I saw this house, I envisioned

As soon as we saw our soon-to-be house in the real estate listing, we knew that landscaping would be one of the projects.  We loved this house and the neighborhood because of the mature trees and landscaping, but some of the landscaping around our house is well overgrown.  We are planning on keeping a lot of it, but some of it needed to be removed because it was either too close to the house or it was beyond trimming. We received a mailer from a tree trimming company a few weeks ago and I decided to give them a call to get a quote on having the large pine tree removed that is in front of the garage.  (You can just see the edge of the branches on the right of the photo.)  We felt like we could remove the holly bush in front of the porch on our own,