Curb Appeal/More Adventures in Gardening (or shall we say: Landscaping)

I think it's safe to say that we no longer have the least amount of curb appeal in the neighborhood. After this weekend's activities, our house actually looks like 1. people live there, and 2. the people who live in the house actually care about the place.

We were starting to realize that our front bushes were an overgrown, unruly mess. Don't you think?


After we finished the tomato garden project on Sunday we decided we could no longer ignore the developing jungle. So we walked over to what we like to call Home Depot II. Better known among the neighbors as Mark's garage. He was busy upstairs replacing windows but yelled down that the hedge trimmers were behind the door, then added a slight warning about how they were in poor condition and very noisy. Didn't bother us considering we hadn't put in the effort to buy our own tool! So we located the hedge trimmers, dug out the extension cord from the basement and tested out the tool. It was in worse shape than Mark thought. I quickly realized we needed ear plugs for this adventure, so I ran downstairs, only discovering on the way back up that Michael had already decided that the hedge trimmers were useless. Of course as we're discussing this, Mark sticks his head out the whole in his house (remember, he's busy replacing windows) and yells at us to just throw it in the dumpster. Done.

While Michael was deciding if we should go buy our own hedge trimmers I attempted to get a head start on bush #1 with a pair of hand trimmers we'd picked up on one of our previous trips to the Depot. It was a slow process, one little branch at a time. I was quite proud of my success, but Michael thought the project was going a little too slow for his taste...


And off to Home Depot (the real one) we went yet again.

Well, the Depot let us down. They didn't have what we wanted so we were forced to go all the way to Lowes. Ok sure, it's not that far, but still!

Another hour later we came home proudly showing off our new hedge trimmers. We were a little cheap and decided to go with the electric version vs. the battery operated version. Boy were we glad we made this choice as began to realize what a long process this was going to be. The battery would have been long dead, not to mentioned we would have lost half the day charging the thing.
Anyhow...enjoy the photos of our successful adventure in hedge trimming.

Here's Michael taking this project to the extreme. All in the name of playing with his power tools.



How do you think we did?





p.s. I was on clean up duty. Check out how well I did raking and removing debris, bagging it up, and temporarily stashing it in the garage.