Introduction

This page has a few photos that show some before and after outside shots of our new house. It is a three bedroom, brick colonial house, built in 1946. It sits on nearly a third of an acre and backs up to a county park. We love it!

Before we moved in no landscaping work had been done at the house for over ten years!You can see the progress we've made in two weekends. Special thanks to Jay who let us borrow his many yard tools. There's still a lot to be done. Check back for new photos.

Just click on any of the photos to get a bigger picture. Please feel free to send in any congratulation or landscaping ideas.

That's the front of the house before we began chopping away at the monster hedge.

That's the front of the house after we finished chopping away at the monster hedge.

That's the left side of the house before chopping.

That's the left side of the house after chopping.

That's the left side of the house with hostas, forsythia, hydrangea.

That's the right side of the house before chopping.

That's the right side of the house after chopping.

Here's Bev pointing to the monster front "tree-bush." Bev was also seen later that week with clippers and a butt-crack.

There's a native box turtle around our house. He's probably wondering were all of the brush and cover went to.

The back of our house is also pretty scary. The whole backyard is covered with English and poison ivy. We've cleaned it up since this photo. We've cut back a few trees and made a frontal assault on the scary ivy. Here's another shot of the house, this time from the very back of our property line.

This is the back of the house after 20 tons of round-up, chopping, pulling, and a little napalm on the scary English Ivy. We covered it with 10 cubic yards of leaf mulch!

Lawn Restoration The first step in any lawn restoration is to strap yourself into a medieval torture machine (the rototiller) which "supposedly" takes all of the labor out of lawn restoration. Believe me, it ain't easy.

Here's the final product after rototilling, adding soil amendments, and seeding.

After a few weeks, presto, you have a nice lawn. (You can also notice that this picture was taken between the installation of the upstairs and downstairs windows.)

Here's a shot of the side yard after a few weeks.

Replacement Windows We were very excited to replace the 52 year old steel casement windows as they were ugly, rusted, broken, and drafty. The first step was to chisel them out from between the walls (they really built things to last in the old days!).

Here's our window installer preparing the window space for our new windows.

There you can see the difference between the old and new windows.

There's the house in the fall (with our Silver Maple in full bloom) with our new lawn and windows.