Front yard? Check!

It's done! It's finally done...

 

 

After much debate, we have finally turned our front yard into an aesthetically pleasing masterpiece. Okay, so maybe it's not a masterpiece, but it doesn't look like an out-of-control mess anymore. We found out that the previous owner was a landscape designer, which explains why we have tons of flower beds and plants all over our property. We've spent the past few months in our front and back yards taking down trees, ripping out bushes, and getting rid of anything that annoyed us and/or was too high maintenance. Last weekend we added mulch to our front flower beds, which marked the end of our front yard work for this season (yay!). Sure, we still have some stuff to finish in the back yard, but we're soooo close to being done!

 

The front yard was a huge project. Things grow out of control down here if you don't constantly trim and maintain. Our front beds had all sorts of low-lying shrubbery that went wild since we purchased the house.

 

 

As you can see in this picture (above) from when we first moved in (2011), there was a lot of greenery just waiting to let loose and take over the beds. We're from NJ. We had no idea that things grew like crazy all year round.

 

 

Last year (above), we tried our best to rid our beds of what we thought we couldn't control. As it turned out, the remaining plants decided to go buckwild and then they grew out of control. It was a vicious cycle.

 

That brings us to this year...

 

 

BAM.

 

Let's take a minute and look at some more pics of our hard work:

 

 

 

 

I'm so proud of us. J and I aren't the type of couple to constantly fight with each other while working on a project, so we are efficient and get things accomplished fairly quickly. This project? It wasn't quick. We've dedicated the past couple of months to serious yard work. We'll be doing even more today in order to get our back yard finished. From a new patio and custom built garden boxes, to cutting down trees and ripping out shrubs, we've done it all this spring. My next landscaping post will be dedicated to our back yard, but for now, I'm just damn proud of what we've done so far.

 

And, just for a quick side-by-side comparison:

 

 

We're Crazy

Before you say, "Nahhh, you guys are fine!" let's take a look at this, shall we?

 

 

What is this, you ask? This is what I posted on Facebook and Twitter on April 11, 2011. Thanks to an iPhone app called Timehop, I can see my past social media history each day. The bigger question may be though, "Why does this post mean that y'all are crazy?" I'll explain...

 

I was at work that day, and J sent me a link. We had been looking at houses in NJ, and were having no luck at all. Everything we liked was way out of our price range, and everything else needed too many renovations. So, that day, J sent me a link to a house for sale in Texas and told me to just "look at it to humor him." Well, I looked at it for about a minute, picked my jaw up from the floor, and texted him back with something along the lines of, "When can we move?"

 

And that was it. April 11, 2011 was the day we decided to move to Texas. 3 months later we flew to Houston and bought a house. 1.5 months after that, we closed on the house and moved in. So, in just under 5 months we randomly decided to move across the country. We left our jobs, left everything and everyone we ever knew, and moved to a place that we had never even been to before. Yes, that's right, the first time we ever went to Houston was when we went to buy our house.

 

So, we're kinda crazy right? Okay, maybe "risky" is a better word. Regardless, I'm damn proud of us. So many people talk about moving here and there, but just stay where they are forever. We got an idea into our heads, seized the opportunity, and ran with it. Sure, we could've crashed and burned in a most epic manner, but we didn't. Maybe we got lucky, or maybe it was just fate. Regardless, it took us 5 months to completely change almost everything about our lives... and it was the best thing to ever happen to us.

 

If you take anything from this little lesson, its this: "Trust your gut and follow your dreams." Our entire relationship has been based on gut instinct. Everything from J deciding to date me (I'm still not sure what I did to make him stick around), to our cross-country move, its all just been a gut feeling as the driving force. If you're happy, you're not hurting anybody, and things feel right, you just go on ahead and follow your dreams. I know, it sounds like something you'd tell a child, but it holds true for all ages. You are never too old to change your life and follow a dream.

 

As a side note, here is what was going on one year ago today, on April 13, 2012:

 

 

It should be noted that we eloped 3 months later, and only told people via a photo on Facebook. Okay, so maybe "crazy" is an accurate word for us...