Curb appeal is very important for a house. I loved watching that TV show when I was in high school. It was so fun to see the before and after and it was amazing to see how much of a difference some paint and landscaping could make. First impressions are everything, and we wanted to make sure that the first time people see our house, it’s something we can be proud of.

CJ has done an amazing job working on the yard over these past few months. We had a ton of weeds, unwanted bushes, extra bricks, and other items preventing our yard from looking as beautiful as it could be. Thankfully, he was able to get our front yard to a blank slate so we could hire a landscaper to install irrigation and plant sod.

What’s most surprising to me, when I look at the progress, is what the house looked like before we bought it. If you look our house up on Google maps, this is what you would see:

I can assure you, our house looks nothing like that today! It’s amazing how big of a difference repainting a house (done before it was put on the market), removing a million juniper bushes, and giving it the love and attention it needed can make. One of our neighbors told us the original owner used to be a “seaman” and, because he was gone for months on end, he wanted a yard that was really low maintenance. I can understand wanting a low maintenance yard but, if I were him, I would have chosen something that looked a little less out of control.

Our house looked like this when we bought it, a bit better but I’ve never been a fan of hedges. We have a ton of spiders so the most frustrating part was walking in between the hedges and into a dozen spiderwebs. Yuck. Plus, we had a ton of bark dust when we first bought the house but that was gone pretty quickly when the monster tree shed all its leaves and we tried to rake/blow away the leaves. That was one of the main reasons why we wanted grass – because we knew that would survive the constant raking of leaves that we will be doing each fall.

As I mentioned in a recent post, we had plans made up for our front and back yard. Once we knew what we wanted done, we called up a few landscapers in the area to get an estimate on how much it would cost to add the irrigation and the lawn. It’s amazing how much of a price difference there was! We ended up going with my parents gardener because he gave us a price that was hard to refuse and we knew we could trust him since he’s been working on my parent’s yard for over 10 years. Relationships are everything.

Our house before the irrigation and grass

It took our gardener 3 days to do the whole job!

RIP Little Tree

Our front yard under construction! Getting the irrigation installed.

Dirt dug for irrigation

It was pretty amazing that they could work so quickly and do such a high quality job. We can’t wait to plant the flowers and bushes which will really pull everything together. We’ll probably do that during the last week in August.

Our new front yard with the grass!

Our gardeners and CJ also removed some bushes on the left side of the house that were taking over the neighbor’s yard. Because it completely opened up the entrance to the backyard, CJ built a pretty snazzy makeshift fence. We’ll post on how he made it soon! It was his first woodworking project and we’re pretty proud of how it turned out.

For the full effect, here’s the before and after! Can you believe it’s the same house!?!? Just wait until we have the flowers and bushes!