The Sourced Home: Before & During: Front Yard Landscaping

"after" pic of the house lit up with the new exterior lights <LOVE>

Holy heck- this is/was a project. Not to mention we decided to tackle this in the middle of July in Alabama...We need to get checked. Our entire front of the house was lined with these massive box-wood-type of shrub. They were totally overgrown and just really looked blah- no color, no depth. We always knew we wanted to redo the front- I was thinking maybe in the fall?? But one day a few weeks ago Whit came home with a drawing of the front of our house with new plant locations. I made a few edits of how the plants should look and then we went around and price shopped several stores, as this was going to be $$$. We ended up purchasing everything from Stumpe Backyard Nursery in St. Florian- about two miles from our house! Anytime we can do business with a local family owned company we know we are going to get a great product at a super fair price! The project (as far as digging up the shrubs and planting) took us about three weeks to complete, and we are totally happy with how the whole thing turned out! Whit was the muscle that took out all of the bushes and he mostly tilled everything up (thanks neighbs for loaning us the tiller!). I dug holes and planted all the plants. The icing on the cake for this project is the exterior lighting. The previous lighting made our house look like the front of a gas station. Now it just looks amazing/fancy/stately/idk I just love it! Whit installed everything- we used these spotlights on the columns and these flood lights on the side windows. Highly suggest using those exterior lights if you have a project like this you want to tackle. The entire wattage used for all the lights is only 70 watts, so the energy usage is super efficient. They are on a sun light sensor and then we have them set to turn off automatically after six hours. Requiring no effort on our part which is great.

Check out the before and during photos!! We still have a TON of work to do on the outside of the house, which is why I am not calling this an "after". I want to paint the shutters (thinking navy?), we need 10x more patio furniture, I am on the hunt for some old iron urns to plant ferns in, the front door side panels need repaired, we need to grow some grass, and the gaudy 1980's lanterns need to go! But right now I think we are going to take a beat from this yard work deal... Until this weekend when my parents come with my dads truck!

This is the drawing I came home to and found out that we are going to be doing landscaping as our next project (along with the laundry room)! Ha! Drawing plans out to gauge how much the project will cost along with what it will look like will seriously save you time, money and your sanity! Going to the nursery we knew what we wanted, didn't over buy and when it came time to planting, it made it pretty seamless because both of us knew the end goal. We (Whit because he is a much better drawer) uses this method before we start each project.