On the Fence About Our Neighbors

After sharing our front yard landscaping progress (and boost of curb appeal) last week, I felt it was high time to share with you, my favorite spot: the backyard. In all of it's glory. 

It literally does take your breath away doesn't it? Personally it makes me want to vomit just a little. After moving in we we immediately shored up as much as we could so that Geoffrey would be able to use the yard safely without getting tetanus, stabbed with heroine needles, joining wild animal gang, I don't know.

It was looking halfway decent considering this photo was taken around January or February. There was still a huge problem though (besides our lack of grass). Our neighbors are hoarders. And by hoarders I mean they are slobs. And if you want to see more of their hoarding/slob tendencies this post has plenty. So needless to say a privacy fence was in order.

Oh and these old school clotheslines had to go.

There is also this super stabby area behind our detached garage that we definitely didn't want Geoffrey getting into. I didn't even want to go back there. Yikes. And what is with all of the random bricks lying around?

A privacy fence sounded easy enough except for one tiny (okay rather tall) detail. This pecan tree that is just on the inside of our chain link fence. 

We called the county in order to get the original site drawings for our house and saw that the pecan tree was literally smack dab in the middle of our property line. Super. So we couldn't build the new fence behind the tree because that isn't our property, and if we built the fence on our side of the tree then we would lose about a foot of yard space, and our yard is already pretty tiny already. So we had to get a little crafty.

We knew that we wanted a horizontal fence. We really loved the idea of combining a modern element with our classic 1930 craftsman bungalow. Juxtaposition and all of that. We also had every intention of building the fence ourselves, but have you ever dug post holes? It's not fun. So we thought we could just get the professionals to dig and set the posts and we would do the rest. So we did our research and received several quotes from reputable companies around town for just the posts. Oddly enough, for some reason it was only about $100 more just to have them do the whole shebang (go figure) so obviously we just let them do it all. No sweat! One thing we found pretty interesting during this process was that several companies either refused to do a horizontal fence for whatever reason, or would charge more for horizontal than a standard dog-ear picket fence. Which is weird because it's less labor and requires less material. Some even said "you do realize this is San Antonio". What does that even mean? We were pretty annoyed by it all. 

We ended up using Alamo Deck and Fence and they were able to get started right away. This was also really nice because it would have taken us several weeks to get the job done, considering we could only work on it after work and on the weekends. The next morning we had a pile of cedar lumber in our yard and a crew of guys at our house ready to go!

We setup a little camera through the blinds so that we could watch the progress from work during the day because we're creepy like that.

I feel like they're flipping a coin to see who gets to dig holes and who gets to nail boards. I think the guy in blue lost.

Or not! They had the posts up in no time, and it all went rather quickly.

A lot of the trees had to be trimmed in the back corner which is why we have a small shrub in the middle of the yard. 

But what about the pecan tree? We ended up deciding to have the fence die into each side of the middle of the tree. It wasn't an ideal situation, but given our options it seemed like the best way go to, and we are really pleased with how it turned out. As long as we couldn't see the neighbors, I was happy as a clam.

It ended up only taking them about two days to get the whole job done. Once they had buttoned everything up Derek and I stained the cedar. We used a sprayer and brush to make sure that the stain was nice and saturated into the wood. We used this stain, and knew that the sun was going to fade the stain rather quickly (yay Texas summers!) so we did two nice thick coats which really helped bring out that nice orangey cedar color we were looking for. 

Just to jog your memory on how awful it looked before, here's a little reminder incase you had already mentally blocked it out.

A few weeks later, we ended up tilling up the yard and leveling it since it was super uneven and lumpy, and added some bermuda grass seed, and here is how it looks today. Clearly this is a yard Geoffrey can be proud of. Wait let's do one more before, just for suspense. 

Making That Curb Appeal More Appealing

Oh hey, remember me? Apologies for the radio silence, we had a bit of a family emergency at the start of the New Year, and are honestly just now getting back on our feet again. In the meantime we've been slowly working on our little bungalow whenever we get a chance. And with summer officially starting this week, what better time to share with your our landscaping bonanza? 

I call it a bonanza because I went into the project with the following range of emotions "how hard can it be?" "why did we wait until it's 100 out to start this project?" "I'm so excited to finally have a decent curb appeal" "bags of dirt are SO heavy" "you can get fitbit steps for tilling soil? Let's do this!". You get the idea. So just as a little refresher, this was the current state of our curb appeal.

Woof. 

Before getting started we knew this:

1. We live in San Antonio, and it rarely rains so we need drought tolerant plants.
2. We wanted a minimalist aesthetic with low maintenance.
3. We hate unruly rose bushes.
4. We wanted to stand out on our block.

We sketched out a few ideas. Naturally. 

We decided to have a large planter bed on each side of the sidewalk with crushed limestone as the filler. Each bed would include a rectangular cedar planter framed in angle iron along with some round metal planters in varying heights. Derek designed all of the planters and built them in our shop. For the round planters,he picked up some 1/4" thick 20" diameter steel pipes from our local metal salvage yard and cut them in random sizes so that we could stagger them and add a little height to the overall look. Each cut took about 45 minutes. Phew!

We picked up some metal edging from Lowe's to block out each area that would be receiving the crushed limestone. These will eventually be replaced with 6" plate steel considering the standard garden edging isn't really holding up like we hoped it would. Inside each "bed" we manually tilled up the soil to essentially kill any grass, weeds, rose bushes, etc.

This. Was. So. Hard. 

Once the soil was tilled and our arms were about to fall off, we laid down sheets of weed block followed by a thick layer of sand. This would suffocate anything from trying to grow other than where we wanted it to. We raked the sand and stomped on it it so that it was nice and compact. I mean you can see that weeds are literally growing through our porch steps, so we knew how stubborn these suckers would be.

We ordered a cubic yard of crushed limestone from Keller Material who delivered it first thing in the morning in the cutest little dump truck. I'm sure our neighbors hated us that day. They poured it all in our drive way and we shoveled it and wheelbarrowed it into place. 

This. Was. Also. Really. Hard.

I should also remind you that it was literally 100 degrees out when we decided to tackle this project. See those two little Nalgenes on the porch? Hydration is key.

We started placing some of the round planters first and played with them a bit until we were happy with the look. 

Then we brought in the large cedar planters and placed them in each bed. We also picked up some 18" pavers from Home Depot to connect our driveway to our sidewalk. This required more tilling, leveling, and sand. Who needs to workout when they can just haul pavers all day? Yikes.

That was all day one. Day two was plant day! We went to a couple nurseries around town and looked at the different drought tolerant plant options, asked all of the necessary questions, and then made a game plan. I did a quick sketch laying out what types of plants would be going where. It was sort of like a plant shopping list. The types of plants we had planned to get were a little expensive, so I wanted to make sure we didn't go overboard, and only stuck to the list. 

While our plants started out small, we wanted them to eventually root into the ground. Since we had just completely blocked off the soil with our weed block and sand, we cut slits into the areas that would be under each plant. That way weeds and grass would still be blocked from growing, and our plants would be able to root as deep as their little hearts desired. 

We also filled each planter with extra bricks we had lying around so that we didn't waste a bunch of soil on filling them.

We planted each plant according to their individual instructions (and whatever I could find online), and watered them accordingly. For drought tolerant plants you have to water them a lot while they acclimate to their new home, but after they are rooted and happy you just let nature take care of them, it's pretty great!

In case you forgot where we came from. Let's just take one last look down memory lane at how our little bungie was when we first moved in.

I can't even. 

Do you want to know the quickest way to meet your neighbors? Have a garage sale. But the second quickest way is to do some landscaping or really any exterior home improvements and they are the first to come over and watch you slave over your yard, and ogle at your fresh curb appeal. We've caught several randoms drive by and snap photos, and that's compliment enough for me!

We ended up straying from the plant plan a teensy bit based on availability but ended up with the following from left to right: rosemary (cedar planter), foxtail fern (pipe), blue agave (pipe), yellow lantana (cedar planter), aloe (limestone), pencil cactus (short pipe), prickly pear cactus (tall pipe).