Outdoor Updates & A Landscaping Tour

It is yard tour time, baby! Every year we try to take a few video tours of the inside of our house, simply to look back on how it has evolved (you can check those out here). And we even made a little outdoor tour post last year, complete with a full video of John bush-wacking his way around our yard. So we thought it would be lively to make that an annual tradition. Simply so we can see how the exterior of our house is evolving as we tackle projects big (like the patio and the deck) and small (like all of the transplanting/seeding/weeding that we do – more on that here). The funny thing is that it is in fact a large difference between this year’s yard tour and last year’s. Both thanks to work we have done on certain parts of the yard and the way that mother nature has fully crazy-fied our backyard (which we have yet to touch).

You think I am kidding. Check out this photo of the backyard last year:

And a shot from the same spot now:

See how much bigger/denser the little planting bed between the two paths above got in the past 12 months? These photos do not do it justice, but our video does. That butterfly bush is about 12 feet tall. Seriously. Somebody call the Guinness Book Of World Records.

Here is another picture of the back yard from last year:

And the same POV from now. See how giant the butterfly bush got? Check out how you in short see the whole tree trunk behind it in the shot above and how it is nearly fully covered by bushery (that is a word in my head) in the photo below.

Here is how things looked staring back at our house from the back of our lot last year:

And here is what that view looks like now. It is truly crazy how much those compact purple bushes above filled in (they got at least three times bigger). The whole house’s foundation is not visible anymore from the same spot. Note: A few folks asked why the nook in the bedroom was there, and you can see from this shot of the back of the house, that it is there so the back looks balanced like this. That large window in the bump-out is in the living room, so if we brought in a window to the nook in an effort to balance the other window on that wall in the bedroom it would be a big window right next to a small window on that bumped out section of the back of the house. Hope this photo makes more sense of that description!

This is a shot from a little over a year ago, so it is even more dramatic. This is what things looked like last spring, before they got semi-big.

And here is what they look like now, with everything in bloom. See how the knockout roses in the left side of the picture above are giant now? And once again that planting bed in the middle (with Sir Butterfly Bush, Sr.) got crazy big? This nearly does not even look like the same POV, but looking at the three big trees in the background can assist you line things up between the before above and the after picture below.

And it is also fairly crazy to see how much the side yard of ours has grown – which was in fact the plan since we’d enjoy to naturalize that area- so yay! We have sufficient to mow in the front and back, so we want the way back and the side to get all woodsy and charming like our first house’s back perimeter. Check out a few photos of the side yard from last year…

And these pics of that area now. Certainly looks bushier, eh? And we have planted a few trees (river birches), so we are simply waiting for those to fill in for even more of a wooded look.

Oh and one spot we did not document last year, but have chose to start this year, is the side lot from the side. So here is what it looks like now. The wild grasses are in fact truly fairly down there.

Here is how the view has changed from the corner of the grass in the front yard. This is that area last year (see the little bush fence that surrounded the yard?):

And here is that area now from the same POV:

And simply to keep this post complete, we will also include the what the front yard looked like last year…

… and what it looks like now:

That is our go-to one so far. Well that and our big patio makeover, which went from this…

… to this.

Uh, yeah – plenty has changed, huh? It is a jungle back there! So we have yet to tackle things out back, but it is truly cool to see how the front has evolved since this old video tour from last year:

For example, in this year’s updated tour you can see how we landscaped the patio, tamed the front yard, got some upgraded patio furniture, seeded the lawn with some more grass, and took out plenty and plenty of bush fences that hid our house from the street (and how we hid a secret outdoor book project with bath towels). Warning: I should never ever be allowed to do these video tours again. You in short need anti-nausea medicine before viewing. Can someone simply be born flail-y?

Video thrashiness aside, we are so glad to have documented evidence of our yard for the summer of 2012. I wonder what next year’s footage will look like? Think we will tackle some of that jungle of ours in the back (we’d enjoy to create a pleasant patch of grass for Burger and Clara to romp around in while naturalizing the area behind the grass into a pleasant privacy riddled woods of sorts). Think we will have a bit more patio furniture and a deck by then? Sure, hope so! Heck, perhaps our carport will be converted into a garage by this time next year. It should be lively to – in the words of Andy Cohen – watch what happens.

Do you folks document outdoor upgrades as well? Does anyone else walk around the house with the video camera, simply to capture how things were looking on a specific day? I hope this is something we keep up with because we wish we had thought to document all of the yearly outdoor changes from our first house on video. Oh, well – live and learn!