House update

I haven't actually yet updated the blog on how the house looks since it has been painted!  And that was back in December??!  Oops!  Anyway, here's the before:

And here's the after.  What a big difference!  House look nice and clean now :-)

 

Although now the front looks very plain!  I have been trying to plant a few more plants in the front with some color and some height.  The "height" part is going to take some time as we will have to wait for the plants to grow.  Ha ha!  And that will probably take a while as most of the plants are succulents :-)

I have added a photo wall in our dining area.  We are still missing some photos but it is already so full.  It is amazing how many framed photos we have! And I would hate to fill up every single wall with photos.  But there are so many good ones. Oh well,... and as for the antique (black) clock... I literally had to bang it a little to make it work again.  And it's always fast!  Still needs some tweaking I guess:

And here is my latest project recently - digging a trench on the side of the house.  Seems that every time it rains, the water flows over to the neighbor's side.  Figured maybe the "good neighbor" thing to do is to start digging!

It has been raining so much, it's scary!  Scary because it almost feels like our retaining wall on the other side has a crack and part of the brick is also being pushed out? YIKES!!!

On a positive note, I am finally able to pull out an old rose bush stump because of the softer soil. YAY!!! Momma 1; Stump 0!!! :-D

After digging the trench, I laid tarp over the trench and also some landscaping fabric on the pathway.  It has been so muddy:

Of course, it rained a lot sooner than I had expected as I am now thinking of perhaps of designing and building a dry bed in the front yard.  Since my trench only went so far, the water from the rain was redirected to a different part of the neighbor's yard. Double oops!!!  I had to send my apologies to my neighbor for another muddy spill over their retaining wall. Thankfully they have been really patient with me... so far:

We tried to funnel some water into a water hose and laid that down the slope but that didn't really work so well.  Didn't really work at all actually!  It was a good idea on paper at least :-)

The boys were having so much fun with the water along the street though.  It's amazing how fast that water is gushing downstream:

And check out the flowers on these succulents.  It's amazing how many flowers are blooming on the succulents in the yard. So pretty!

I will post a follow-up on the trench and sidewalk/pathway on the side of the house in a few weeks :-D