Curb Appeal with an Edge - and a Sandbox!
The bathroom floor tile has arrived - at least that's what Home Depot tells us. We still have to pick it up, but it's here!
And speaking of my lovely assistant, she ended up getting her first sandbox, thanks to a fortuitous circumstance.
A small patch of ground bordering the house was nothing but grass and weeds (despite it being situated between a bed of flowers and a lilac bush), so I began digging up the sod and hand tilling the earth in preparation for turning it into another flower bed. Imagine my surprise when, about 8 inches down, I struck stone! I'd encountered a small patch of flat concrete left over from a covered cistern or hand pump well (the house is over 100 years old, after all). That's when I realized that I could clear out the dirt, square it off, and make it a nice play area for the little one.
Some months ago, I'd been reading about integrating sandboxes with natural landscaping features - rather than just dumping a big plastic or wooden sandbox out in the yard - and I wanted to try my own hand at it. With that in mind, I started with an old bed footboard left by the previous owners, and some stone blocks I had in the garage, along with a a single bag of small stones (about $2-3) to cover the partial area of dirt that wasn't flat concrete.
To finish off the edges, I used similarly-sized stones from Lowes (specifically 12" L x 8" W x 4" H Anchor 11.6-in Charcoal/Tan Fresco Wall stones at $3.28 each). The 17 bags of sand were also supposed to come from Lowes, but when I got there I found that the price was $4/bag, so I went half a mile further up the road to Stein Gardens & Gifts and got them for only $2.50/bag. Oh, and I used a single stepping stone (from Lowes, about $5) as an accent piece/sitting area, and three of the leftover flowerbed stones to fill in small gaps around the footboard.
As with the flowerbed edging, I didn't glue or cement the blocks together, so I'll have to make some minor leveling and straightening adjustments as the dirt and sand settles. So all in all, it's a little makeshift, but for my first inexperienced attempt I think it turned out well. Here are some photos of what I ended up with:
Since this stretch of house wall isn't particularly attractive, I'm considering putting some sort of board behind it, with an attractive mural and perhaps some child-safe hooks to hang toys from - or perhaps including a long garden trough with sand or flowers for the little one to play with. It was going to be a small flowerbed of its own, situated behind the sandbox, but that would have dramatically reduced the overall box size, so I skipped it.
I also still have to construct a cover (ideally attractive and easily removable/replaceable) for the entire sandbox, so we can keep the local raccoons and cats from using it as a litterbox. In the meantime I have a very makeshift cover composed of three items from the garage. It ain't pretty, but it works - for now.
However, that's not what today's post is about. Today I'm going to showcase some yard work I did last
weekend. Since we're having a big party on Sunday, most of which will hopefully take place outside (barring inclement weather), I wanted to clean out some weeds and work on the flower beds that border the west and south sides of the house.
The first job I tackled was to start edging the flower beds. I wanted something simple and low to the ground that allows me to run the lawnmower wheels over it, so I went with some small stones from Home Depot (specifically 7" L x 3.5" W x 1.75" H RumbleStone Mini - Cafe brand at $0.58 each).
For this job, my tools were very simple - a small wooden plank to carry multiple stones at once, a square-pointed shovel, a hand trowel, and a long strip of wood that I used as a guide to keep my shovel cuts (mostly) straight. You can see some photos of the end result below.
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| Also, new flowers! (L to R): Sunny Border Blue Speedwell, Bravado Coneflower, and Black-Eyed Susan |
I'll have to make some minor leveling and straightening adjustments as the dirt settles, but otherwise it's complete, and went pretty smoothly, though my occasional assistant kept stealing my tools...
A small patch of ground bordering the house was nothing but grass and weeds (despite it being situated between a bed of flowers and a lilac bush), so I began digging up the sod and hand tilling the earth in preparation for turning it into another flower bed. Imagine my surprise when, about 8 inches down, I struck stone! I'd encountered a small patch of flat concrete left over from a covered cistern or hand pump well (the house is over 100 years old, after all). That's when I realized that I could clear out the dirt, square it off, and make it a nice play area for the little one.
To finish off the edges, I used similarly-sized stones from Lowes (specifically 12" L x 8" W x 4" H Anchor 11.6-in Charcoal/Tan Fresco Wall stones at $3.28 each). The 17 bags of sand were also supposed to come from Lowes, but when I got there I found that the price was $4/bag, so I went half a mile further up the road to Stein Gardens & Gifts and got them for only $2.50/bag. Oh, and I used a single stepping stone (from Lowes, about $5) as an accent piece/sitting area, and three of the leftover flowerbed stones to fill in small gaps around the footboard.
As with the flowerbed edging, I didn't glue or cement the blocks together, so I'll have to make some minor leveling and straightening adjustments as the dirt and sand settles. So all in all, it's a little makeshift, but for my first inexperienced attempt I think it turned out well. Here are some photos of what I ended up with:
Since this stretch of house wall isn't particularly attractive, I'm considering putting some sort of board behind it, with an attractive mural and perhaps some child-safe hooks to hang toys from - or perhaps including a long garden trough with sand or flowers for the little one to play with. It was going to be a small flowerbed of its own, situated behind the sandbox, but that would have dramatically reduced the overall box size, so I skipped it.
I also still have to construct a cover (ideally attractive and easily removable/replaceable) for the entire sandbox, so we can keep the local raccoons and cats from using it as a litterbox. In the meantime I have a very makeshift cover composed of three items from the garage. It ain't pretty, but it works - for now.
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