So today's the day for the big reveal of my latest home improvement project: the Backyard Makeover. I want to thank all who made suggestions on what we should do. We listened.
Sponsored by Lowes
As you probably know, I'm a Lowe's Creative Ideas Network Ambassador and, like the bedroom makeover and the curb appeal project, Lowe's asked me to do a creative ideas project in my backyard, too.
Now, our backyard was a disaster. The biggest problem was a sprinkler system that needed a lot of work including a sprinkler timer that had given up the ghost.
So, many of you suggested we needed to fix the lawn, which we did and continue to improve. Now, between the new irrigation timer controller, the grass seed, and some soil to sprinkle on top, there wasn't much budget left.
But we managed to stretch it pretty well, and with some sweat equity, we are pleased with the results so far.
This project presented a few special challenges. We live in a very (did I say very?) hot environment. How hot is it? It's so hot, the only native cactus in the area lives in the cooler foothills outside of town. So when placing plants in our garden we have to be extremely careful about how much direct sun they get.
So here are the pictures:
Before: As you can see, just a few tuffs of grass and a couple of plants.
After: The grass is growing nicely and we have added a touch of color, height, and depth. Also, we cleaned up the palm on the far left.
Before: Lots of pots, chairs covered in spider webs and rocks on the concrete without a home.
After: We cleaned up the space and covered the soil around the day lilly with the rocks, then we added a wooden border to keep the rocks and soil in place.
We found the wooden borders in the back of the garden center at Lowe's. They are super easy to install since they are connected to each other and have stakes built in. Just push them in the ground and voila! Then we added a few plants.
Before: This was my covered patio and my very neglected lawn (the green parts were recently arrived).
After: We cleaned the patio and the furniture and the grass is filling in nicely.
We added a hanging plant and a few allen + roth lanterns with citronella candles.
Our backyard light was broken and horrible, lucky for us we found the same model, a Portfolio White Outdoor Flush Mount Light. We like the design of the fixture.
We love our new lawn
So that's it so far. Sometimes the simple, obvious things are the best things to do. This project has really helped us realize we can get great results with really very little money.
Setting a budget and getting started on the obvious things helped us get moving on a lot of clean-up we've been putting off. (Like moving those rocks off the concrete).
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