Front yard progress

Well, its been about two years since we moved in and I can say that we are (almost) finally done with re landscaping our front yard.  Holy batman, that was a TON of work!  Below is what the house looked like when we bought it (minus the pond, instead just picture dirt)!

OLD!

Sean removed the agave, weird pepper tree/bush, dead fruit tree along with all the things the previous owner decided to bury when he removed the koi pond.  Are you ready for it...tires, glass bottles, tons of buried PVC, electrical wire and condiut, chunks of concrete, vials of insulin, an epi pen, buried family pets, clothing, a buried tree stump, loads and loads of decorative rock, rusty nails..the list goes on!

We knocked down the east side of the patio that was closed in...and pushed the fence back.

We also took down the fence that was hiding the AC condenser and moved the condenser to our side yard, removed the non functioning water softener and opened up the front patio that had been closed up.

Let there be light!

 He also smashed concrete slab after concrete slab and removed all of the old pavers and ugly half done planters.  Oh, and I can't forget the lovely bench in the front too!  So basically I bought ibuprofen in bulk at Costco and Sean spent many a night immobilized with back pain.  Yuck.

See you later weird benches and pavers

Luckily we get to take part in the city of Tucson's brush and bulky service twice a year so all the stuff we removed was taken away for free!  Sweet!

After the Koi pond was removed we were left with no walkway and a bunch of dirt.

I still can't believe the work required to get the front yard back to zero!  Now for the fun part of building it back up to our dream front yard...

NEW!

First, we had a company install a wrought iron fence around the front perimeter.  That project took approximately 3 months of planning to get final approval from the historic planning committee and one day of installation.   It turned out beautiful, we couldn't have been happier!  Our house is on a raised lot so for safety purposes we needed this ASAP!  Next we had to save and save and save! We wanted new sidewalks and planters and a patio but didn't want to do it ourselves so we got a pretty good deal from a contractor and we got to use up all the old bricks stacked in our backyard.

New patio, old bricks

 Before we had them install we needed to re-do our main water line because it was running through a concert slab we needed to demolish.  So lots of digging and gluing and learning the fine art of plumbing preceded the masonry work!  Sean also had to design the irrigation so we would know where to put sleeves under the new walkways.  So many moving parts, it's a good thing Sean has an excellent brain for attention to detail.  

New walkway

New planters

This kid makes everything look cuter :)

The new walkways went in and our patio looked great! Then came the actual installation of our irrigation system.  We dug and dug and dug to the point where our front yard looked like an archaeological site!  Our curious neighbors would stop and ask us about our progress every now and then.  Thanks to Amazon I know our mailman and UPS man by first name and they always commented on our progress.   

We assembled our irrigation, tested and buried it, what a great feeling! Now for the fun part, the plants! We planted our front planters first, then installed our edging and planted our perimeter. 

New edging and perimeter plants

 Last came the soil prep for the grass.  Before I get all turf crazy, Sean and I did a ton of research on planting and maintaining turf in the desert.    We decided on planting BobSod, it's a hybrid Bermuda that does well in shade and is also the turf for Chase field in Phoenix.  The sod itself came from a company in Phoenix that were pretty great.  We followed their soul prep exactly, it was so much work! We first mixed in a compost/topsoil mix to the dirt.  Then leveled, then tilled, then leveled some more.  The frustrating thing was that we did some of these steps way to early (like months too early) so we had to basically do it twice.  Good times! Then added bags of gypsum to help with drainage, more compost and then levels and rolled the yard to a perfect finish.  The sod was installed and rolled out and I'm pretty sure Sean and I stared at our front yard for hours straight.  We had to tweak our sprinklers a bit but the grass looks great and we couldn't be happier with the way everything turned out!

Graham is pretty excited about his new front yard!

So, whats next?  Well, we are taking a break until winter.  Our backyard looks like a construction dump site, so hopefully we will get the piles of rock and dirt removed soon so its safe for the little one.  After that we are doing nothing until maybe early next year.  We need to save money to complete the back fence and to re landscape and put pavers down in the back.  We are hoping to put a pergola and kids play set in the back along with a couple raised planter beds and plant some trees.  I'm hoping to have that done by the end of the spring next year.  We'll see!