Where I've been....

So - I've been gone for awhile but it's because I've been very busy! A few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to totally re-do the landscaping in the front of the house. Well, since I am a stay at home mom our budget didn't really allow for someone to come and do it. One day I decided that I would surprise Dave and start taking out the bushes myself. This is what it looked like before (about 1 1/2 year ago when we bought the house - we had the large holly tree removed professionally last summer so I didn't do that!):
15 bushes later this is what the house looked like:
and here are all 15 bushes :
I pulled out 15 of them and Dave pulled out the 2 big ones that flanked the entrance way. He used the truck to do those because the roots were really in there. I was pretty darn proud of myself for taking them out by my lonesome! It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Heck, maybe I should start up a business - but I will only remove shrubs less than 3 ft in cool weather. Plus, you can't transplant them anywhere. The only way I can get them out is totally cut them down. I tried transplanting an azalea and I couldn't get any leverage to get under it when it still had all of its branches.

Today I started my edging of the mulch beds by hand. I wanted a nice professional look to them and I figured the only way to get that was to do it by hand. I'm about halfway through the front yard now.

Here is what else I was up to:I bought a bunch of seedlings from Ebay and they shipped them to me from North Dakota. Once they got to me I had to plant all of them into larger pots. I couldn't put them in the ground yet because it wasn't quite warm enough and I didn't have the mulch beds ready yet (they're still not ready!). I planted about 130 seedlings. Most of them took but they're still quite small. This picture is from a few weeks ago but they're still not that much larger. I thought I'd save money by doing it this way although I don't think I'll have real plants going until August now! Hopefully they'll take off now that that the weather has stabilized.

I also built a plant holder out of an old chair I found in the dumpster last year. It was missing the seat so I cut out some plywood to make a seat and then cut a whole in the middle. The back of the chair broke during the huge monsoons we had here so I cut it out, filled it with wood filler and hung a succulent from the back. It turned out pretty cute. Not bad for the 3 bucks of plywood it cost to do it.
Well... that's what I've been doing the past month. If I wasn't working outside, I was trying to clean up inside. While I worked outside the inside got neglected - so once it started raining i had a huge mess to clean up inside. Now that it's nice outside again the inside is once again becoming a mess. I just can't keep a healthy balance!

I will try and update more often now that I've got my picture uploaded and I'm starting to balance things a bit more. It's hard with little ones! Until later....