Updated Design

Design for the front yard and porch with the colors we chose to paint the house (the green here is darken than what we chose, but I'm lazy). The back of the house currently has these colors, but we were waiting to do the rest until after the new windows were put in.

Other than that, this is updated to show the new windows we put in (yay!) and I drew up a better door (so that it matches our actual door). And again, the porch columns and railing are an idea of what to replace the really crappy iron railing and columns with. Still deciding on column style, a basic square post or a boxed and bricked post, or boxed and bricked with a taped post top...

One of these days, I need to draw up a map of the garden idea and post it. It'll be easier to ID all the plants and locations with a top map. There's a lot of native plants and drought-tolerate plants along with fruit trees/vines (kiwi, avocado, orange, lemon, lime and California grapes). Although, we semi-recently added blueberries to the growing mix so the grapes might be replaced with those.

Patio Almost Complete!

There's been a lot of progress on the patio project. I was personally out of town for 5 weeks and in that time all of the "legs" of the patio were completed, a gazebo went up and several plants were in. It was a total surprise when I got back. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos to show the many stages the patio was in between the last post and the current post!



Click for more:



The only progress photo I have before many of the plantings, the compost, the grass seed planting.


Gazebo that came with screening, and although you can't see it, we put a light fixture put in the top of it. The neon fencing is protecting our newly planted grass seed. The blue-green structure in the background is the hot tub area, which was reused from a gazebo a friend was taking down.

Also, a tree in front of the hot tub area and a short bushy tree on the immediate right were free from a guy we got base rock/sand from when we were building the square part of the patio. We think the tall one is some sort of pear tree, maybe decorative, and that the short one is a fig.



The smaller greens on this side were freshly planted.


Transplanted our maple, which hasn't been happy in a container, with a prime spot. The green mosaic ball looks awesome with the red maple and the dark compost color behind it.


There's solar pathway lighting on every leg of the patio (the small brown box-like things).


It'll look awesome when there's some lush grass there!


The original brick path was much thinner and didn't go all the way up to the house, instead there was a section of lame lava rock. We expanded the brick path with a new pattern and got rid of the lava rocks completely! There was a bunch of loose sand still sitting on it.


To celebrate both the patio and the upcoming birthday of Trevor (later this month, of which we'll have a party on the patio), Michelle bought a new grill. The old grill was dying and Home Depot had this one on a very nice sale.

In other news, we had our first rain of the season two nights ago. We haven't been directly watering the grass in the front, because of the drought, so it looks pretty trashy and dead. When I'd wash my car, I'd park it on the grass so that the water gets two uses out of it, though.

We put up the rest of the lava rocks we have (which is way too many) on craigslist and we'll hopefully be rid of that stuff forever!

Backyard Patio

Since we're in a drought and we haven't been watering the lawns (both front and back), we've started putting in a patio in the middle of the back lawn area. Lava rock from the side of the house as base rock, a little leftover sand from the side walkway and a lot of free sand from a guy on craigslist. I'm loving that we're getting rid of the stupid lava rocks this way, haha.





These were from four days ago, since then we've put in the square bricks, including at least one of the paths. Photos of that coming soon.

The plan is to have a strip of grass and several planting areas around the patio. It's a perfect spot to put out our barbeque pit and maybe make a method for the occasional overhang to be put in.

The guy who gave us the sand on craigslist also had two tall, potted trees that he had semi-killed (by not watering) that he gave us for free as well. He didn't remember what kind of trees they were anymore, so we'll see what happens with those.

Finished Path and Found Object

A friend had a lot of sand he wanted to get rid of, so we grabbed it up to finish the bricks on the side yard.


Yeah, too lazy to move the hose, hah.


Bricks are slopped to meet up with the existing concrete path.


Front to back view.

No more stepping on red lava rocks on the side! Yay!

And, when digging around this little guy was found...