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??

Baby Trees!

Okay, they aren't actually baby trees, they're technically bushes but they're so cute Blake and I have adopted them as our little baby trees :)
We're trying to up our curb appeal since we're wanting to sell our house, and this is what we're working with:

Doesn't exactly scream "buy me" right? Well, we took a trip to Lowe's to get some stuff to make it awesome, but once we got there we realized we had absolutely no idea what we were doing! We came to the conclusion we wanted to have bushes that would get about 3-4 feet tall so it wouldn't clutter up the window and garden area like our bushes do now and some flowers to go in between and motivate people to buy our house (I read online that yellow does that for people for whatever reason). We also needed a tree to fill that nice little whole that was left after the tree that the builders put in literally fell over...So after walking around the garden center for an hour or so, we found these cute little bushes:

We planned to put these on the outer corners of the garden area, to replace this weed-looking bush:

And this odd looking bush (it really bothers me that our bushes don't match!!)

But, then when we put our little baby trees by the garden area, this is what we got:

We determined they will look great after they grow a bit, but for now they look like the little cousin of the bushes we have. And since we are wanting to sell our house as quickly as possible, giving our bushes growing time just isn't quite in the cards. But, we love them so much! They're just so dang cute! So, we're getting some pots to put them in so they can grow and we can use them at our new house or something! 

We also decided that instead of going and buying more plants, we're just going to spruce up what we have the best we can (think pine bark, edger rocks, and hedge trimmers) :)

And as for the tree...all the trees at Lowe's would get too big and after we looked at all the other trees on our street that are all still not bearing leaves or any form of life, we're thinking we're going to have to give the soil a makeover! So, for now, we're rocking our hole! 

Do you guys have any ideas for what we could do to spruce up our garden area or tree hole? Do y'all have crappy soil too and know how to make things grow?? Any and all ideas are much appreciated!!! :)

Hope you all are having a fantastic weekend! Remember to focus on The Brighter Things! :)