31 for 21: Shrubbery be gone!

For those of you whose curiosity was whetted by the comment in yesterday's blog post, here's the old view and the new view. Notice the pile of the remains of the demo by the street in the new view pic.

The backstory--We bought this house almost 4 years ago, and originally, I thought the landscaping was nice, especially the lawn lights, which were a big fave of mine from the first visit. And it was nice then. BUT we don't do lawns. We don't do trimming, we don't do maintenance on landscaping. We actually looked into synthetic grass. Nope, not kidding. That's how much we don't do lawns.

So these hedges in front of the house have grown out of hand. I think we've trimmed them maybe twice since we've lived here, but neither time was all that complete or well done. For the most part, I haven't minded it, except that our next-door neighbor has an immaculate lawn and spends hours a week caring for it. I've really particularly hated the bush on the end, next to the driveway. It's like a pine bush or something weird, but it just looked way out of place to me and infringed upon precious driveway space. So I've been wanting to get that thing out of there for ages, but since I knew no one in this house was up to the task of removing it, and I always have more important jobs for the parents when they come to work, I figured it would be around forever. Then lately I've been thinking maybe I'd just have someone come out to do the work for us, get a quote to see if it's reasonable to do an overhaul of the front yard. I've been thinking alot about resale, although we have no immediate plans, it seems to be a back-of-the-mind constant. The neighbor who takes such great care of his lawn has a son who works for a landscaping company here in town, so I chatted with him about it one evening. In less than a week, we'd developed a plan, he'd offered to do the work, along with his dad (retired, hence the lawn), and had an agreement. I get a great deal on the plants since they're extras at the landscaping company, and the guys are giving me a huge break on the labor, so we're in business for a very reasonable amount.

Sunday evening, LD, the son, was in the front yard tearing things out while we were in the back working on the pool and stuff. Then the dad/neighbor, N, was here on Monday--ALL DAY--taking the hedges out and trimming trees in the back as well. Package deal, I guess. He had help from LC, other son (lives right behind us), and A, LC's son.

Here's the yard last weekend, before.

Here's stage 2, with partial demo complete.

Here's stage 3, almost done with demo. I kind of like the little mushroom tree.

Last night they were pulling out stumps for quite a while...and N has been here all day so far working on the rest of the hedge stumps.

Here's one of the trees in the back that got a trim. It used to touch the ground. I didn't understand that this was to be the end result, but I can see the benefit...except that the grass will now grow under there and need to be mowed!

I'll be posting more pics as we get into the planting phase later this week... here's a peek though at a tree that will be going in.