September 2009 Weddings
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Outside(house, yard, etc)
Warning
No formatter is installed for the format bbhtml
Re: Home
Not the best pictures, because they were taken the day we closed on the house (and it was rainy and yucky outside).

Our yard is to the left of the house and extends down to the end of the street (about .20 acres).
These are my attempts at gardening:

There is a shed behind the house and a small (about 10x10) patch of grass where the dogs go poopy. I would like to put up a fence and make the poopy place a patio, but meh, I don't think it's going to happen any time soon.
Landscaping/Project Curb Appeal is our project for this year. I have a few before & afters. We have been put in many, many hours so far. Warning.. I'm going to get braggy.
This is the front. Since this was taken we have sealed the driveway, taken out the flag pole in the yard, ripped out the bushes, built a tiered flower bed, put new edging around the planting areas, added red landscape bark, built two flower boxes, planted some spirea bushes and added a bird bath. We're still working on determining what to plant on the tiered side, but we'll get there. A new roof, fascia and gutters will be put on next week.

Before:
During/After:


Here is the back. This is from last year. Since then we trimmed the tree way back and replaced the hostas with day lilies. This year we'll plant perennials instead of the monster amount of impatiens we used last year.

Here are some flowers. I love my flowers.




We live on a quiet street with lots of mature trees. We just got new siding on our house too, so it's pretty updated on the outside.
We have a big backyard and it's all fenced in. There's also a little shed back there.
We tore down our sunroom last year, so now we have a deck and a huge patio.
I also have several gardens around the house. The flowers are just starting to come up for the season.
And i thought I'd save the best part for last. Our gorgeous in-ground pool. The perfect Summer party spot!
At Night
Daytime
Oh yeah, that's me floating around in a giant Reese's cup!
Our front yard is sh!t. We have two huge trees that block out all sunlight, so we have to resort to mulch rather than grass. It's a constant battle between Chris and I about what we're going to do with it, but now I'm in the process of researching busheS that don't need much sunlight to grow.
The backyard, however, was pretty much a selling point. I wish I could take credit for the landscaping, but alas, that was the prior owner's doing, and we're just maintaining as best as we can.
The back door leads out to a deck covered by a grapevine-woven trellis. It makes for amazing natural shade in the summertime. This is also where we keep our table and chairs for entertaining outside.
The deck leads down to a small brick patio, perfect for our firepit. The yard is small, but sufficient. Our driveway cuts through to meet an easement behind our house so that we don't have to deal with backing out onto the main street, and other than our neighbor's house, all that is behind us is woods.
updated 10.03.12
OK, I had planne on taking new pictures this morning, but it's all rainy and yucky. So some of these aren't the best pictures and we've done some updating since.
Front of the house before: yucky juniper bushes, you can kind of see the sunken driveway (big crack in the middle) (and my old little red car!)
and our sunken front porch:
and the only decent picture I have of the back yard: we live on like 1/3 of an acre, so we have a pretty big back yard. Since this picture was taken, the garden in back has been fenced in. Those two bushes are lilac bushes (in full bloom right now!) and the tree is a bright green maple tree. We (especially the dogs) LOVE the back yard.
here's facing the house. more cracked concrete, yay! We're hoping this year to put a big old deck in. See the weird spot with all the bricks? They used to have a hot tub., bunches of dead grass under there.
Some AFTER pics!:
ok, haven't done much to the back yard, but we kind of revamped where those hot tub pavers were - put in a flower bed and planted hostas
back to the front yard:
we ripped out all those ugly juniper bushes, made another flower bed in the front yard. Now it's thriving with big old Columbines (bloom in spring), Daylillies (summer), and mums (fall).
last summer, we also had our concrete work re-done in the front. So the new patio got poured, as did the driveway. We poured each a little bigger, so there's a walkway on each side of the driveway, and the pourch is like a foot wider. Also did some landscaping in front of the porch. (since this picture, we've added more bushes and flowers to the landscaping). Our grass is also a lot greener, this was right after the driveway and porch were poured and the grass was pretty toast from being run over by the Bobcat.
we've also gotten a new mailbox with a pretty wooden post and put in another flower bed around the mailbox. Don't have pictures of that...
This is the only pic I had on my phone:
We also have a spacious fenced-in backyard.
:Blog:
This is what our house looked like. Currently, those bradford pears are in a heap of other debris, the roof has a large blue tarp, and a window is covered with tarps and duct tape, but it's still standing. Yay house!

Love our front porch! We have really nice flowerbeds, too. Nothing was in bloom when I took these pics a few months ago, though.
Half of our patio furniture is gone and our fire pit is broken, but that just means I get to pick out new ones. Hooray for home owner's insurance! The little shed was there when we bought the house and escaped unharmed. No clue how.
And this is our bay window and the flowerbeds in the back. I need to take more pics now that things are blooming.
We have 1/2 an acre. There's a spot in back for our garden, and I have pots of herbs, lettuce, and spinach around the patio. We've been talking about adding a fence. Then, we went to our neighbor's fence bonfire and decided our procrastination was a blessing in disguise.