The back side: What a difference!

I inadvertently took all off last week off from blogging but in a second you’ll see what I’ve been up to. I’ve been busy, busy, busy working on the back yard (which is really the side yard but for whatever reason we call it the back yard). And it wasn’t until after work yesterday when I snapped a few photos that I realized:
1. Holy smokes, somewhere along the line this turned into a really big project, and
2. What a difference from nine months ago.

Here’s what the house looked like September 1, 2010:

And here’s what it looks like today:

That’s some kind of after, huh? In the past six weeks or so, I put in the stone path (which leads to our detached garage), the stone retaining walls on either side of the path, and all of the plantings to the right of the path and the little bit you see in the foreground on the left side of the path. I’ll give you a closer look at some of the new gardens, which are pretty bare bones, later this week. My goal for this summer was to just get the framework in, so I focused on getting in trees and shrubs. I filled in with many of the perennials I had around from buying sprees and some of the things I have purchased through the Yahoo plant-buying co-op.

I’ll try to take some photos of the garden from different angles. I struggled for a long time about whether to add the half-moon shaped garden on the left side of the path (as you’re looking at it now) so I’ll be interested to hear people’s thoughts on that.
I haven’t written much about the renovation since it ended because I was just exhausted and sick of the whole project. It definitely was emotionally draining and every time I tried to blog about it, it got way too preachy and whiny, so I’m saving that for another time when I have had more time to gain better perspective on it. I will tell you this, though: Toward the end, when it became clear that we were way over budget, we gave serious though to eliminating the deck from the plan, and looking at this photo, I’m so happy we kept it. We have been eating outside much more at a table under the pergola and it truly feels like an extension of the living area.