before and after (& more)

So, just in case you forgot how crappy the yard looked when we bought the house, here are two shots taken from the same spot:

BEFORE


AFTER



A few more photos of Dave's latest deck work:






And here's one of the coolest parts of the garden: the control panel for the irrigation system:





Our next-door neighbors Marc & Tina are moving to Washington DC, so they've been fixing up their house to stage and sell it. Next weekend is the first open house (and I think broker tour is Tuesday) so we did a few things this weekend to make our house look a little better from the street. Cameron scrubbed the terrazo steps to get rid of all the mold and funk that's accumulated during the deluge, and I pulled all the weeds and gave all the sidewalk cracks a shot of Roundup.

While Cameron tidied up our street tree (removing the stakes and filling the sidewalk cut-out with river stones), I painted over the stucco patch from when we had the dryrot repaired in the window bay, and freshened up the person-door. (We were going to wait until our new windows came in before we had the whole exterior painted, but I didn't want prospective neighbors to think we were the white-trash liability next door...) We also replaced the weather-stripping on the garage door, so it wouldn't look so junky. The whole thing's getting replaced soon, but... well, Marc & Tina have been such good neighbors, and their house looks so nice now, it seemed like the least we could do.




(...I know it doesn't look very different, but *I* know it is :D )