Pavers make it all better

When we moved in, the left side of our house looked like this:

ROUGH! One of our biggest investments was replacing the fence as soon as we moved in. I am SO glad I splurged for white vinyl when I look back on these pictures!

In the middle of the lawn renovations last year, our neighbors helped clean up the area by removing all the weeds and rocks along both sides of our house. That left things looking like this:

Aside from laying down a layer of weed guard, this is how it has sat for the past 7 months! There were a couple of reasons for this: 1) We had some drainage issues on this side of the house which limited what we could put here and 2) we uncovered a large area of cement run off at the stop of the 20 ft walkway into the backyard. This meant we could not add mulch here ( as we did along the 20 ft walk way on the right side of the house) because with enough rain, it would be "floating". I was against adding rock. Pavers seemed to be the only way to go. On a side note, we could ONLY add mulch on the right side of our house as our sprinkler system runs to the front along here. Busted pipe + Pavers = pulling up pavers. Not my cup of tea.

We got a couple of estimates before deciding on a contractor. Due to the cost of a pallet and the area being so small, the estimates ended up being more than anticipated. The original area was 5 ft wide by 20 feet long. It ended up only costing $100 more to have an additional 20 feet of pavers installed creating a walk way to the edge of our deck into the backyard.

We selected a stone on Tuesday and the installers showed up Friday morning (about 2 weeks ago) to install the pavers, which we loved.

However, there is one thing we didn't love. See the small space between the fence and the pavers in the above picture? Well apparently my fence line runs off as you walk past the gate into the backyard. Meaning we had 8 inches of space between the fence and the pavers in the backyard, like in the picture below,

That's a huge gap! And I was not a happy camper. I called our installer who explained how the line ran off and how it is customary to start from the house. He could add another row of pavers to the back but then would have to stop randomly as there was not enough space to run another row all the way to the front. He suggested we add stone. I wasn't happy with this solution as I had envisioned pavers to the fence line and I did NOT want to have to weed. HELLO, that was part of the reason behind the pavers!

After sulking for a week, Tim and I went to Lowe's to see what our options were. We took home two different stones but ultimately we both agreed on Lava Rock, as it brought out a lot of the red color in the pavers. We also have red bark mulch running around most of our property so this seemed to blend the best.

I realized as we were adding the Lava Rock, that the cement went almost to the fence. Hopefully, this will block the majority of the weeds from growing under our fence from our neighbor's yard. While at Lowe's, they had a sale on Solar Lights (3 for $10) so we picked up 8 oil rubbed bronze lights to match the rest of our outdoor lighting. We spaced them evenly before added the rock.

Then we added 8 bags of Lava Rock along the fence, leaving us with this:

Although, I was not happy with having to add the rock along the side, I am satisfied with the results. I mean it looks 100 times better than when we moved it. Look at this side by side comparison.