Adding a bit of curb appeal

It’s no secret that our house isn’t the most inviting home on the street.  Overgrown azaleas, three foot tall weeds, and loads of pine straw don’t really scream “Please, come in!” I think it’s probably something more like “Enter here and meet your untimely demise in the most horrific manner you could ever conjure up in your weird, twisted brain.”

We have bigger plans to help with that which I’ll be sharing next week, but for now I wanted to share a little curb appeal project we worked on a couple of weeks ago.

That’s not technically the finished “after” shot but apparently I haven’t taken a picture yet and it’s raining today.

What I like most about this is that even though it was a pretty small project, it makes me happy every time I get home. Funny how those small projects can end up having such a big impact.

Our mailbox wasn’t the prettiest thing around and it didn’t help that it was surrounded by weeds and grass that I’m pretty sure was just more weeds. Plus, the address numbers were old, rusty, and pretty difficult to read.

We decided it was time to freshen up the area so while Kyle started edging and digging up grass, I took the old mailbox off the post. When we first moved in, we had a crazy bad bug problem in our mailbox. We stuck a bug bomb in one Saturday night and retrieved it before the mail ran the following Monday. I always wondered where all of the bugs went because they weren’t all flopped over dead inside the mailbox when we took out the bug bomb. Well, I found them…

Bfgfglkehgeghaog. Even though they were all dead, I had to take a minute. Jess does not do bugs – dead or alive.

After we removed the box, numbers, and surrounding grass, we gave the post a coat of spray paint. We opted for the same color we used when we updated our lamp post. After that, we popped on our new numbers and the fancy new mailbox.

Then it was time to pretty up the ground. We laid down some weed fabric and cut out holes to put a few planters. We decided to go this route instead of planting directly into the ground because we want to easily be able to switch out the flowers based on the season – for now, we picked up four mums.

Then it was time to dig. This is, of course, the point in which we ran into issues. I mean, why wouldn’t we run into issues with such a simple project? Hi, have you met our house? Turns out under that first layer we removed, the soil (ahem, red mud) was extremely rocky. I’m talking afraid-you-may-bend-your-shovel-or-break-something-rocky. Long story short, we dug as far as we could and shoved the containers as far as they would go for a “for now” fix and then we spread some mulch to pull it all together (this is when the “after” photo above was taken – you can see how the containers aren’t all at the same height).

We bought a pick ax the next day and Kyle went to town on busting rock and getting the containers further down so they weren’t all at awkward heights.

Somewhere in there, we also laid down some pavers to create a mow over edging. The bottom pavers are flush with the ground so Kyle can just roll right over them when he mows the grass. A little bit of sand swept on top, and they’re good to go. We picked these guys up at Lowe’s for something like $0.54 each and a $4 bag o’ sand.

We have a long way to go on our front yard – don’t even get me started on the backyard – but I think this is a pretty good start.

Miss Barley seems happy with it anyway…