Extreme Front Yard Makeover.

Matt and I are moving back to Florida next year, and we own a house that MUST sell.  We do not want to be landlords and have no desire to have a mortgage along with a rent payment in the event we don't sell our house.  While we were in DC, I decided it would probably be a good idea to fancy up our front yard for a little curb appeal.  I come up with ideas and plans, and Matt is always reeled in to help me execute them.  He has the much needed muscle that I so desparately lack.  So Saturday we spent most of the afternoon raking up old mulch from our flower beds in the front yard, and ripping out the black sheet weed "stopper" stuff.  After that Matt dug up two bushes that were so ugly and I'm so happy now that they're outta' there!  We bagged everything up and put it in Matt's truck to take to the dump the next day.  Sunday we woke up early because we had much to accomplish before going back to work on Monday.  We went to the dump and arrived to find the "yard work trash" section closed.  It would have been a huge bummer, if I wasn't married to a CRIMINAL!  We dumped our bags of mulch into a regular trash dumpster, and then sneakily drove to the closed section to drop off the branches and stumps of the two bushes he dug up.  I got seriously scared when a worker drove down the hill towards us, but was able to breathe a sigh of relief when he kept on driving.  We high tailed it out of there and made our way to Home Depot.  We purchased 60 concrete retaining wall stones.  I ambitiously decided while coming up with my lawn beautifying scheme that we needed a decorative wall around each of our flower beds.  The nice people of Home Depot loaded them up for us.  Before we could begin building our wall, we had to build a small trench for the foundation blocks.  We made the trench Saturday after removing all the mulch, so Sunday we had to measure, level and tamper the trench so it was even.  Thanks to Matt's muscle, we completed this part and then began to build our wall.  One the ends, the blocks were too long to fit, so Matt had to use a masonry chisel to break them.  Who knew I married such a talented sculptor?!  He did such a good job, and our wall looks so awesome!  We didn't want to tackle too much at once, so this coming weekend, we're going to complete the other side.  As hard as it was, we enjoyed completing this project together, and our really proud of the end result.  Here are some of the pictures of our progress: