Patio Reveal {Part 2, Landscaping}

Welcome to Part 2 of our Patio and Back yard reveal! This part of the re-do has been my favorite (probably because it included both pretty things and I did most of the designing regarding this part of the yard).

Our first flower bed, we made out of necessity, in the middle of the day, in the dead of summer, last year. We had some plants being ripped out off a lot and being ummmm "gifted" to us and we had to have a place to plant them when they arrived.


We dug out and created the shape we wanted the bed to be.

  In this flower bed we transplanted a huge foxtail fern (ferny-fern) that Mama and P gave me when I first moved to Texas. We also planted our fig tree (figgy-fig, and no we don't name all our plants) from P. We also added three Indian Hawthorne bushes and a Japanese Blueberry tree to the bed, along with sweet potato vine and lantana.


Completed Flower bed

 We left the yard alone since then, as we were under drought conditions and were not able to water our lawns. We did however secretely water our flower beds to keep our new plants alive and well, shhhhh don't tell the city of LC!

Fast forward 7 months.....
Our next phase of the backyard re-do started this past Friday night with Hubster mowing the yard and preparing the backyard for sod. We had to re-work some of the elevation of the yard to ensure proper draining (since the Honey Badger destroyed part of it during the patio break-up).


Hubster working on the elevation (and also scratching his butt?).

This is the transom level we used to make sure the back yard would drain properly.

After the elevation was worked out, we mapped out where our new flower bed would go. We wanted to expand the tiny space we had mulched around our crepe myrtle tree to be an actual flower bed.


If you look closely you can see the red spray paint. That is what will become the outline of the flower bed.

Once this was completed, we called it a night. Alex (who did our sod) was going to be at our house between 8-9am, so we needed to get some rest!

The next morning, while we waited on Alex and his crew to get to the house, we started working on our spool table (I will be posting about this very soon!) We also finished sealing our cypress swing so we could put it under the patio soon. When we first got it, we put it out there figuring we would let it weather naturally. Well, the salt water in the air around here had other plans and the swing started to mold almost immediately! :( We had to take it down and sand down all the mold, bleach the entire swing then seal it. It is almost done though, yay!

So, here is our poor grass before beginning to sod it. You can see where we had the dog kennel broken out and you can also see the brown patches from both cinch bugs and the intense drought we had last year.

Here is the side of our yad where the dog kennel was.

Middle of the yard.



More middle of the yard. I forgot to take a picture of the other side of the yard :(



Alex and his crew didn't waste any time! They started to remove the old sod and lay down the new and it wasn't long before our yard started to look like this... They kept any "good grass" that we had left, which sadly, wasn't much...

No more dog kennel-dead grass!

This is the other side of our yard that I forgot to take a before picture of.

More side yard.



You can also see the outline of the flowerbed in the photo above! About this time, the guys left to get more sod (I think they underestimated the amount of dead grass that we had...) While they went to get more sod, Hubster and I went to a nursery to pick up some more stone to make our flower bed border, some flat flagstone pieces to use as steping stones, to get more stain for the spool table, a tomato plant and pot for my upside-down tomato planter idea I found on Pinterest and to get lunch. We had an extremely busy day with multiple projects going on at once!!!!

We headed to Sun-Land Nursery in Dickinson and it was fabulous! They had TONS of different types of stone and rocks and all shapes and sizes. They had big carts that you loaded up then weighed and each stone was a different price depending on type and size. The border stones that we got for the patio were $.27, the larger rocks were $.20 and the flagstone stepping stones were $.24 all per lb. We ended up getting everything we needed for a little over $150, which we didn't think was too bad considering how much we bought!



Here is some of our stone we got.



Next, we started shaping out the flowerbed. At first it was an oval and I really wanted it to have some curves. So, after a little tweaking, we made this bean-shaped flower bed that I loved.



You can see there is one little corner of the yard they couldn't finish as they ran out of sod, but Alex is going to give Hubster some more sod this week so we can finish it. After Alex and his crew finished up, Hubster and I got busy working on filling and planting the flowerbed. This included going BACK to Sun-Land (the lady was happy to see us again)  and the Houston Garden Center to get top soil, mulch and plants of course to plant in it! We decided on purple dragon coleus to plant around our iron kettle, bright green coleus and begonias to plant in the flower bed itself along with a white-out rose (similiar to white knock-out rose).

Here is my sweet little guy enjoying the beautiful weather and watching us work!

Here are our two lovely flower beds, complete with matching stone borders, a stone pathway and lush plants! Please disregard the sprinkler and hose pipe, we have to make sure to water it like a motha so it won't die (again).

Here are two pictures of how our first flower bed looks now. We have had to tame the sweet potato vine a few times as it tends to get a little OTC (outta control). Also we have had to cut back the lantana quite a few times. Since we first made it, we have also added snap dragons and cabbage during the fall months. One other change was that we added the big iron fleur de lis (it used to live in our front flower bed, but the bottle brush tree outgrew it and completely covered it so we had to find a new place for it to live). We also will be getting some sort of climbing plant to add to this bed- Mama and G'mama (the master gardeners of the family) are working on finding us the perfect plant!

Below is our completed second flower bed. Hubster says this type of flower bed is referred to as an "island bed" for those in the "biz". You can see my sweet iron kettle with an asparagus fern planted in it (it is now more level, after seeing this picture I had to take action!)  and also my upside-down tomato planter (with mint planted in the top) on my shephard's hook.

Close-up of my kettle.



Another detail pic of the kettle.




Mama gave me this sweet little birdhouse a while back and I knew I wanted to hang it in the backyard, I just had to wait to find the perfect spot!

Below are just a few more pictures of the completed backyard. Not that we have a huge amount of space to work with, but we make the best of it. We have two pretty flower beds that we can admire from our new patio. We have a whole side yard that can fit a swing-set or whatever kiddo-related items we are sure to have one day and we still have lots of empty space and grass for Lucky to enjoy, explore and hang out.

I love the different shapes of these stepping stones.

We feel pretty good about this Part 2 of our patio/back yard re-do! I think we will eventually add some type of border grass around the patio, but we are going to wait until our new St. Augustine grass gets more settled before we make any other changes.

Below you will see how we ended our super busy Saturday and how we started off our more-relaxing Sunday. :)



Great way to end the day! Hanging out on our patio with my favorite guy and my favorite beer.




Community Coffee is always the best way to start your mornings. :)



Thanks for stopping by! Hope y'all had a great weekend! Stay tuned for Part 3 of the patio reveal coming soon!