The New House Project: Out of Doors

When I first introduced you to our New House Project, I showed the facade of the house but did not include photos of the rest of the property. This is mostly because though a beautiful and expansive lot, it had been allowed to grow uncontrollably for several years. Here is the "front patio" area as it was when we arrived:


The vines growing on the house may look charming at first glance but their effect was to completely block out the light and view from the upstairs. They were choking some palm trees and stopping any flow down the gutters. Here is another photo of vines choking trees, this time in the side yard:

Here's the front patio while the workers were in process:

And finally clean...almost finished:

We felt that the separation between the pavers was too difficult to work with, to hard to fill in with sod, or even with gravel you had to sort of jump to the next paver because each was so far apart. This spacing also prevented a table or chairs to fill the area as undoubtedly one leg would always land off the pavers. My solution was to rearrange the pavers into a path from the garage door through this patio to the driveway. The rest was filled in with sod.

Another before:

And after:

The extensive clean-up and trimming of the property meant that we had at least 6 piles of leaves, branches, etc that looked like this:


Lastly, we opened up some space to allow for walking around the front of the house (in the opposite direction of the front patio) to the side and eventually rear of the house.

The areas you see with the old, red mulch (which I do not like) will be filled with poinsettias this week in anticipation of the holidays. There will also be poinsettias in the front patio area along the bare walls and around the palm tree. Continue around the side and the back looks like this:

Here is where my two youngest little ones play everyday (currently 2 1/2 and 12 months). All of the large trees are avocados, so there is no shortage of squirrels to watch and chase! I created the path with leftover pavers from the front patio and did enclose a gravel area bordering the house where I was certain the grass would not grow due to lack of sunlight. It is all a work in progress but we are quickly enjoying those cooler evenings spending lots of time out of doors. Hope you enjoyed the visit...stop by anytime.