Landscaping Excitement!

Well! There has been some movement on the landscaping front! How exciting!
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that our front garden area was kinda icky and that we hope to spruce it up for some awesome curb appeal. Well, we got started on that last weekend! Thanks to a belated wedding present from Blake's parents, we had the means to get started, and I was (and still am) SUPER excited!
Well, we got started a bit late, so by the time we decided what we wanted and got everything back to our house and unloaded, it was right at sun down! But, I was going out of town the day after we bought all of this stuff, so it had to be done that day! So, that's why most of these pics look like they were taken in the dark...it's because they were!

This is what we got:

Three boxwoods

10 bags of lava rock and 12 edging fences

Once we got everything on the porch, we got started digging:

(Shout out to my mother-in-law totally dominating this bush!)

Then, we placed the bushes where we wanted them to go!

Unfortunately, after we dug two holes for the new bushes, we realized they weren't placed the way we wanted....so we had to recover the old holes and dig new ones....sad face

Finally, we got them in the ground, but when we started putting the lava rock down, we realized we didn't get enough...not by a long shot....we ended up needing 7 more bags, putting the total at 17 bags of lava rock!

Then, Blake put all the fences in the ground, and we ended up with this:

(Disregard the random bush on the side...we're craigslisting our old bushes but until then, they'll be chilling next to our new bushes) :) 

Here's a close up picture of the fences. I totally love these, because they show the lava rocks, look like metal but are actually plastic, and were really inexpensive!

We're super thrilled with how it turned out! We still have a few more things to do like get some flowers to go in between the bushes, add something to the left (where the "private residence" sign is), and add some sod to right in front of the fences where that icky mud is! So, still a little ways to go, but for now, it definitely looks way better than it did, and it totally looks way Brighter to me!

Just as a reminder, here's what it used to look like:

So, have you guys been bitten by the it's-warm-outside-so-I-want-my-house-to-look-amazing bug? Any new landscaping projects you've taken on? Or have any ideas to make mine more amazing??