goodbye flower bed - hello lawn

love these flowers

Project: Remove flower bed and turn back into lawn

Cost: About $20 for the grass seed

Time to complete:  About 2 hours of both the hubs and I's time

Skills needed: Raking and digging

Before we had Addie, my husband and I spent most of our free time doing projects around our little house - after having Addie our priorities have changed a bit and we feel pretty accomplished getting through our weekends getting the laundry done and dishes washed.

We purchased our house in 2007 at what we thought was a great deal...but then meet the 2008 and 2009 real estate market and that great deal soon became  a great overpayment!  When we purchased the house we really bought it because we loved the neighborhood as our 1960s ranch was all original.  Needless to say, we have spent the last 4 years doing alot and although we still have a lot to do, some big and some small, I thought I'd share the start of a very little project we did last weekend.  My husband and I started when we moved in 4 years ago by working on the exterior landscaping by removing some gigantic holly bushes and adding in flower beds, rose bushes, other perennials, a weeping cherry tree, and a japanese maple.  The only thing we left were 3 beautiful peonies that were in full bloom when we moved in.  I adore these bushes as their flowers are absolutely marvelous and in late april and most of may, provide me with all of the free flowers a girl could ever want.  I love placing them all around the house and enjoying their shabby chic look.  The only problem - my husband despises them - not their beauty - he agrees with me on that, its their location that he hates.  They were located in a flower bed that exists between the sidewalk and the front yard - which is kind of an odd place for a flower bed and while I have managed to keep him from tearing it out for 4 years, I lost the battle this year.  And actually, I surrendered.  While being pregnant last summer, and this being one of the few existing flower beds from when we moved in, it had no weed paper down and the hot summer sun beats on it most of the day so weeding it and keeping up with it had become a struggle.  The other rub was that there was a lamp post located at the edge of this flower bed that we had never figured out how to operate in our 4 years and the paint was starting to peel and we had no desire to replace it or fix it up so it was time to say good-bye to it as well.  So...this past weekend, we went at it.  I raked off all of the mulch from the flower bed, dug up the peonies with my fingers crossed that they survive the relocation, and dug out the lamp post.  Next we grounded the wires to the lamp post and leveled out the flower bed so it was even with the rest of the yard and the sidewalk and threw down some "heat tolerant blue" grass seed and gave it a good bath with the hopes that soon we will have "lawn" where there once was a flower bed.

Here is a pictorial depiction of what we did:

Here's the view before we got started.  You can see the lamp post at the far end of the flower bed (next to the driveway) and how quickly the weeds had already started to grow on the edges of the bed.  Plus, I do agree with the hubs, the placement of this flower bed looked awkward in our yard.

Here is a close-up of the lamp post after we dug it out:

And, here is a pic of how my hubs grounded out the wires that had attached the post.  He first secured the end of each individual wire with wire nuts and then used black electrical tape to tape them off (you can see the black taped mass on the right side of the hole.  We then filled the hole with dirt.

Heres a pic of the relocated peonies that I will hopefully survive in their new location.

And, here's a pic of the bed all leveled out and the grass seed put down.  Now are fingers are crossed that the grass grows in quickly.  I'll post an update when we start to see some green:)

J