Making Our Home More Inviting

I spend a lot of time on the interior of our home, but not enough time is spent working on projects on the outside of our house. We decided that we would spend these last few weeks of the warmer weather working on some of these projects. The benefit of waiting until later in the summer/fall to do your projects is that a lot of these outdoor items are on clearance. The downside though is that the selection is very limited and can make getting supplies for your projects more difficult.

The first project on our list of things to do was to work on our back patio. We had a brick patio behind our house that had been uprooted by a large tree root. We saved the money to remove the tree and then needed to put our patio back together. What we found were lots of broken bricks and our hopes of expanding the patio (and matching old street pavers) seemed very far away. My in-laws happened to be redoing their patio and graciously let us have their brick so we made a new design with the new brick and old brick together. The only cost to us is the sand, blood, sweat and tears that are going into the new patio. I think it is going to be beautiful when it is done.

Our next project is working on the front exterior of the home. We had several cracks in our driveway and don't have the funds to repave the driveway. Ryan got some crack filler (I will not go into how many jokes go along with that phrase when we talk about the repairs!) and filled the spots so that they will hopefully not continue cracking.

I spent a great deal of time on our flower beds and planted mums for the front bed and also got a pot and planted more mums in it for our doorstep. I divided some of my perennials and relocated them to the back bed, which was looking very sparse. I rounded it out with some red mulch, which made the bed look more finished.

Finally, our front tree needed a little sprucing up so we decided to use some more of our free brick and brick a box for it and fill it with some shade-loving perennials and mulch. I was originally going to do all of this myself and surprise my husband, but the surprise ended up being on him because I was too much of a wimp in the heat and couldn't get the bricks level like I wanted.

I just wanted to share some of our before pictures and then I will share some of our after photos. I am hoping it will be everything we are hoping for and that it help give our house a little more curb appeal. It is all still a work in progress, but we have high hopes of creating the home of our dreams on a budget!