Working on Curb Appeal

Gus and I bought our house in July of '08.  The house had been vacant for close to a year because the previous owners relocated to Pittsburgh.  In that year the yard had been very neglected and was way overgrown.  I'd also say the previous owners had horrible taste in landscaping!  We've continued to neglect the yard since we moved in though.  I'm pretty sure this annoys the crap out of our overly anal neighbor across the street.  He's the type that mows his yard several times a week and when he isn't mowing he's grooming it in some other way.  I can only imagine the stress it causes him to look at our mess of a front yard. 

Although you can't really see how bad it was, here is a picture of our house when we bought it:

Do you see the giant crepe myrtle about to overtake our bay windows?!?!  Yeah, we got rid of that almost immediately.  What's the point in having a two story bay window if you're going to hide it with an overgrown tree???  Not to mention, it was causing the bay window surround to rot away.  Sorry tree, you're pretty but you had to go.  We also trimmed back the other tree that was growing into our roof!

Last year, Gus did a little digging up of dead bushes and we cleared out one island that was covered in Lamb's Ear.  Here is a picture of lamb's ear in case you've never seen it:

I'm not sure about you, but I'm not a fan of this stuff.  There was so much of it and it just looks so boring and gloomy.  After we cleared that island we filled it in with black mulch.  Nothing fancy, but it definitely looked better. 

During our recent monsoon season, most of the black mulch was washed away.  We decided we should put pavers around the island to help keep mulch in and to plant some colorful flowers.  Now, I'll admit, I've NEVER planted flowers in my life.  I've watched my mom do it many times but I've never actually participated.  Sad, huh?  I tried to lay them out first but during the actual planting I didn't do a good job of centering them.  Oh well, it's definitely an improvement. 

Before:

(Notice those beautiful bags of mulch sitting on the rock. . . . . they've been in that exact spot since last August. . . .ooooops.  We even hosted Thanksgiving and didn't bother to move them.  Don't try to be cool like us though, the bottom bag was infested with ants, gross.)

After:

It's not much, but it's definitely an improvement and hopefully the petunias will get a little bigger!  Now, we just need to put some plants in where the crepe myrtle used to be and clean out the island that is down by our sidewalk and we won't be that yard in the neighborhood anymore.