Adding Curb appeal

As I have mentioned before, the landscaping at our house was disastrous at the time of purchase. We have worked really hard over the past year to get things looking better and more "us". However, we have two small areas on either side of the garage that have sat untouched for a year.  Add that to the fact that we did not have gutters and we were left with this mess:

We have since paid someone to come and install gutters and repaired the area we had to cut out to fix our sprinkler system. Over the past two weekends, Tim and I finally got around to cleaning up this area. We purchased some retention wall bricks from Lowe's to enclose the areas.

I then laid down Weed Guard with some landscape pins in both of the areas. I am all about things looking nice but I HATE weeding. We have used this stuff everywhere and a year later, I have not had to weed! Tip: Sam's club often sells the HUGE role of weed guard this time of year. And it ends up being significantly cheaper then at Lowe's or Home Depot.

 In terms of landscaping, Tim and I had been talking about adding "circle trees" to these areas for quite some time. "Circle Trees", as we call them, are really called Eugenia Topiary. It was a bit of a splurge at $40 a plant. We also had a hard time locating two plants that were similar in size and shape. We wanted them to look somewhat symmetrical since they were going to be framing either side of our garage. We ended up finding two similar plants at Home Depot after striking out at two different Lowe's.

I think it s HUGE improvement. Here is the street view, please overlook the messy driveway!