Landscaping: Day 2

Well I'm back to share some more adventures in landscaping the side yard. See the "before" here, and our Day 1 progress here. Sunday was Day 2 of our adventure, and we definitely made a lot of progress. We managed to finish laying bricks, putting down weed fabric, planting, and putting down rock and mulch all the way up to the basement entry door. Here's where we left off Sunday night:

It was around 9:30 pm when we called it quits, so we were literally working in the dark to finish up the fabric, rock, and mulch. We had a spotlight of course, but it was going to rain the next day, so we wanted to get the mulch down before it turned to mud!

Here's where we started out on Day 2:

Trent had to till up a little more of the dirt to get the bricks level, then we started laying them down again, one by one.

Trent picked up more bricks after work. We had gotten 20 the first day, and he picked up 45 more the next day.

I handed the bricks over to Trent and watched him level out the dirt and lay them down. I've heard it's best to use sand or rock as a base, but we compacted the dirt pretty well and there is grooves in the stones, so they seem pretty secure. The stones are also really heavy and weighted down. We think we might cap them off with capstones on the top for a more finished look, too.

Being on a slope, getting the bricks to look straight has been a little bit of a challenge, but we're using our orange nylon string as a guide for the bottom row to be level, and it seems to be working pretty well. We've gotten a couple of compliments from the neighbors already while we were out working, too - one said that the bricks look really nice and straight, which is definitely good to hear!

And just in case you think I didn't help at all and just watched Trent do all the work since all of my pictures have been of him...Trent made sure to get some pictures of me in action:


Yep, I did the heavy lifting. Transfering bags of rock, sand, and mulch. And retrieving 22 pound landscaping bricks. Try doing that while being tiny! Ha.

As always, Saleen helped watched, too.

When she wasn't staring down / barking at the occasional squirrel, of course.

Once we got up to the basement door, which completed the largest "section," I wanted to plant my hydrangea and a few of my hostas to get them in as soon as we could. So we got them planted. My hydrangea was looking a little "wilty" so I'm hoping it can spring back up before we have another repeat of last year (fyi - I killed one off). Please stay alive little hydrangea, I'm counting on you this time!

We also planted three little hostas. We'll probably need to plant a couple more things to fill in space, since it's looking a little bare still.

The next picture is after it got dark - we were still working away trying to get this section finished that night before the rain came.

We got it all done though, and it's looking pretty good after the second day of work:

We put rock in the back to help with drainage, then used 8 whole bags of mulch just on this section. It is the largest area we have to do, so the corner on the other side of the basement door shouldn't use as much materials. We will still have to pick more up, though.

All in all, it's been fun so far. It's cool to see the yard transforming from an eye sore to being all pretty. Especially when we started out here:

And have gotten this far already:

It's definitely an improvement! Lots more to do, though! The rain Monday set us back, and Trent has been working late, but we're trying to find time to finish it when we can. Hopefully I'll have another update with the "finished product" soon!