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Landscaping Project

GMR Badass

GMR Badass

New member
I know that it's definitely random but figured I'd end up posting about it.....

Wife has been nagging me about how much she hates the current landscaping. Previous owners did a lot of very nice and high end upgrades inside the home but seemed to have completely forgot about the landscaping. They seem to have kept the grass looking nice but all other area of landscaping they let go or didn't care much about. Wife wants it done yesterday so she wanted to hire a local company so she wanted to get a few quotes. Lowest one came back at $7800 and highest one came back at $8200 and that didn't include repairing the sidewalk. I flat out told her "NO" and she was pissed....but understood why.

Current plans are to literally gut everything and start over, only thing staying is a tree, which is overgrown and will be cut back. I'm going to attempt to complete the project in roughly 4 weeks and try to hit a budget of under $3000. The cost still seems crazy high to me but considering my alternative of paying someone else to do it I'm all for it (and I don't have to sleep on the couch) I'll try and post in here on the progress and try to keep track of the man hours.





And here is the proposed planned. There will be 2 smaller straight retaining walls and one that will go around the tree.
 


th epine tree thats growing sideways in this pic, to the right of the front door. one of those would look great in front of the 2 window to the right of your front door.

you got a nive blank canvas there. plan looks cool too. what you want to do is once your beds are done, if adding dirt or not, set all your plants up and play with them, leave them there came back 30 minutes later to see if you still like where they are lol


if you like that bush or any of what you see in this pic let me know ill find out its proper name for ya.
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REDCOMPG said:
Nice house. Sell Whipple car and have awesome yard?
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Whipple car isn't going anywhere for a while. After landscaping is done gutting and re-doing laundry room along with wiring/insulating/drywall/paint the garage. Whipple car needs a warm place to sleep in these awesome winters here.

TwiztdWun said:
Also, your drawing of the overview reminds me of a complex Nintendo controller.
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Never thought about it....but funny.

siLversLeigh said:
Nice house
Click to expand...

Thanks. First and hopefully only home.
 
Dam you should see my back yard...makes yours look like heaven...pine needles everywhere!


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heres some more ideas greg. my friends back yard. yes hes a landscaper and it shows..

this just got planted a few days ago, zero maint. the trellises on the fence, we made them. then planted some vine plant that has purple flowers. theres like 5 or 6 of them on the fence around the yard.

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this little guy will reach out to the right as it grows, once again, zero maint.

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the main branch top view.

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just stuff every where lol 4 tons of rocks boulders too easy if not more.

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and this views not done yet, the wall there is the back pourch its getting redone still but much closer to done.

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the only thing that needs to be trimmed in his whole yard is the small round plants. everything else if maint free. and new mulch yearly and weed pulling. lots of flowers make it look filled in and pretty too.
 


There is a lot going on in that yard that I wouldn't be a fan of. I grew up my the parents having 2 acres of grass so I'm use to having more grass than landscaping. I'm not really enlarging the current beds or anything like that. Just adding two tiered section and doing the wall around the tree. Clean and simple looks is the goal.

Here is where I'm at after working on it a little this weekend. I wanted to try and keep track of my hours worked but that's proving to be difficult with all the other projects going on around the house. In the morning the area is in the shade and around noon it's turn into pretty rough work. Throughout this week I hope to have the stone base and sand in and ready for block.



 
i was just posting them to show bushes really. he made the beds that full for privacy as you can see 4 houses no problem right over the fence, in maybe 3 years it will all fill out and be a nice cover. theres a bunch of small trees in there too that are just small still.

hard to believe but i thought he was done, theres 5 more bushes added since i last saw it. ( the close ups are new) hard to stop when it cost him next to nothing for bushes.
 
oh, your work is coming along nicely. keep it up.

when does all the block and stuff show up? or are you picking that up yourself?
 
I have a local friend that allows me to use his pickup truck....so I'll be placing the order and they will put them on pallets for me. Should take 2 trips is my guess but the place that makes them is only 10 miles away. When I call to place the order I'll also find out what the delivery cost would end up being, and if it's about the same cost I'll go the easy route and have them delivered.
 
if they got a boom truck or spider they can put the black as close as they can to your work. that alone is worth the normal $175 deliver fee around here.
 


How high if a retaining wall are you talking here?

And I think throwing in a berm or two in the front would look damn good. My parents love landscaping and I was their slave labor. The work can be hard for a berm, and the results do not show immediately, but given a year or two and it really makes your yard pop out looking good.I will get some pics of their front and back. Then if you like what you see I can dig up some specifics for you.
 
When doing landscaping on ones own place, I feel that attention and planning should go into how much maintenance it'll take and you are willing to do each week/month/year. Plan ahead regarding winter and where snow will end up or have to be removed etc.

I see in the drawing that you get rid of the hard 90 degree angle where the existing bed didn't meet the walk to the front door. :th_thumbsup-wink: Ensure you don't make the curve too drastic and cause another issue area. Plan around the fact that one day you may have a small rider, I've found that keeps curves reasonable which means that it's decent with a push mower as well.

Tree: it's a decent looking tree, however it appears to grow fast and be planted too close to the house. Unless it's a dwarf tree variant, remove it altogether and own up to the fact that in 5-8 years you will pay to have it removed etc. Trees are great in general, when too close to a house.. it's an issue. I moved in to a great sized tree in the front yard, over 10 years it grew too big and was interfering with the house and power lines.
Not many pics of this little guy

All it takes is one perfect storm and your potential for home damage is crazy



Which leads to you really becoming buddies with your construction type neighbor


Shrubs/bushes: assume that whatever you plan will look super small originally and expect that if it should grow 3 foot diameter that with time and chasing your future kid around that you may not always have time to trim it... hence 4.5f foot diamter bush/shrub. Plan ahead and always ensure you have about 18"-24" of clear space between all plantings and the house for air and sun. Critters, mold/mildew/moss etc loves areas that end up overgrown like this.
 
Not very tall at all. The ones that are going on each side of the door are going to be 2 stone high plus a capstone ~15" with some of it buried of course so should be about a foot high all said and done. The wall that is going to vary in height but at it's highest point it should be around 2ft.

Pictures don't really capture the overall grading but the yard itself is fairly flat so there are no plans for me to do anything like that.

Wife is still under the assumption that I'm going to be paying someone to plant everything........somehow trying to avoid that.
 
The tree that is there is way over grown. The tree is supposed to be trimmed to look like a ball at a much lower level. One of the guys that gave the landscaping quote said that he'd cut it way back and it wouldn't hurt it. It's going to be roughly half the size that it currently is and will be trimmed each year to maintain that.

As far as the planning around maintenance goes both wife and I want to keep it simple. We don't mind trimming and mulching once a year and then very little maintenance after that.
 
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