Do-It-Ourselves Landscaping is FINISHED!

After getting a landscaping quote from a company, Justin and I decided we could save quite a bit of money by doing all our landscaping ourselves. Here are some pictures from our adventure. (You can click on any picture to see a larger version.)

Before pictures:



First, we realized we needed to get the boulders in place before we started adding soil to build up the beds. Who wants to wait a week for delivery and pay delivery charges when we have a 4Runner that can hold 1500 lbs of boulders?! So a worker at the store used their tractor to lift the boulders into the back of the 4Runner, then we just had to get them out and into place--easier said than done. We decided to just roll the boulders out of the car and onto the dirt. Then, so we wouldn't damage our lawn, and to help the boulders slide, Justin put down metal sheets and wood to get the boulders where they needed to be.


I then dug a trench and buried the drain pipe so it wouldn't be going right through the middle of the front bed. Next, I realized how hard the soil had become so I spent a day using a shovel to turn over all the dirt in the beds to loosen it up. Because the soil was incredibly packed, it took all day to just turn over the soil. The only problem after was that the clods of dirt I dug up were still hard clods of dirt shaped like the shovel. We spent a couple hours trying to break up the clods to get nice soft dirt, but these dirt clods were hard as rocks. So Justin ran to Home Depot to rent a tiller. (Since it was 10:00 at night, these pictures aren't too great--they don't accurately show how large and hard our dirt clods were!)


We worked til after midnight that night to get our soil loosened up so we could add the new top soil that had been delivered earlier that day and dumped on our driveway--rain was expected that night, and we didn't want our new soil turning to mud and running off our driveway.

We also had our deciduous trees delivered by the same company, but we still needed to buy our pine trees and all our shrubs and bushes. So another day we found two 5-foot colorado blue spruces and some shrubs while we were out on errands as a family. Amazingly enough, we got everything in our car, and even had room for some Costco groceries!

We did lots of planting the next several days before our mulch was delivered--7 trees, 24 bushes.


After several more trips to find the last few shrubs and flowers, we finally finished up and spread the mulch. We're finally done!