Easy Ways to Spruce up your Yard

A little {yard} love can go along way with a few tools like an edger, a hose reel cart and some mulch. Find three simple and easy ways to spruce up your yard.

Wow, this post has taken me about four months to get up on the blog. Either it was bad weather, crazy schedules or being out of town, I just couldn’t seem to take pictures at the right time, or motivate Coach to do the work when I was available to take pictures of his handiwork. 🙂 But we finally – halfway through the summer – have made some simple updates to the outside of our home.

When we bought the house, the yard and “landscaping” looked like this. Tons of big overgrown bushes and lots of weeds. It was a foreclosure, so the house had sat empty for a while before we took ownership. Disaster city!

I’ve shared before in my State of the Yard Address about how we improved the outside of the house just by ripping out some of the larger vegetation, mulching the front beds and trimming up the bushes we left in place.

So, each year we try to give a little more attention to the outside of our home. And eventually I’d even like to paint the shutters and door a different color.

All the while, Coach has been wanting an edger because we both agree that an edged yard looks 100 times better than all of this overgrowth on the driveway and sidewalks.

We chose an inexpensive, electric edger to get the job done. Coach said it was easy to use and I can vouch that it didn’t take him long to set it up and get everything edged. {It doesn’t hurt that he cut the clover in the after picture, too. Next year’s goal: kill the weeds in the yard so that it looks nicer and the HOA will quit bothering us. Ha!}

I just love coming down the driveway now and seeing that crisp line along the edge of the drive. It’s the little things, you know. 🙂

I should have taken a before and after pic of the driveway, because it was pretty rough! I’m loving the clean-up look.

We also picked out an awesome hose reel cart and resin wicker hose hideaway to straighten up the hose situation around the house.

I know this is probably the least glamorous shot to ever grace my blog, but we just left the hoses lying on the ground outside, pretty much year-round. It wasn’t cute. And Coach had to move the hoses anytime he wanted to mow. This makes things much easier!

We chose the resin wicker hose hideaway for the backyard since it will stay put and not need to be moved. But I picked out the hose cart for the side of the house, so that we could easily move it to the front of the house when needed.

And then lastly, we put down some mulch in the front beds. What are flower beds called when they don’t have flowers in them? Just beds? Sure, we’ll go with it.

We needed to cover up the old, faded mulch from last year {a generic brand} and cover up the dead {and living} weeds. I am hoping that this Scott’s Enhanced Mulch will keep it’s nice rich color a little better than what we used last year.

Coach did all of the work. I can’t take any credit for it. 🙂 And I think the yard and beds look great now!

Well … it may be time to pull out the hedge trimmer again and clean up those bushes. I guess a man’s work is never done. I’ll be sure to add that to the honey-do list.

Don’t miss out on the behind-the-scenes fun!

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Disclosure: Thanks to Ace Hardware for providing these much-needed tools and compensating me for my time and this blog post. All opinions and positions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ace Hardware. This post contains affiliate links.