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I’ve got a rather ambitious plan for the weekend. I really don’t expect to get it all done, but any progress is progress and where my yard is concerned anything will be an improvement.

1. There are at least five shrubs of some ungodly sort occupying various spots around the front of the house. If I accomplish nothing else, my primary mission this weekend will be to rip them all out and send them to the dump.
2. The non-designers who “landscaped” the yard used no fewer than three different styles of stepping stones. Personally, I hate stepping stones, so I’ll take them all up and remove them to the dump with the bushes. Eventually I’d like to put concrete paving bricks down in the driveway, off of which I’ll extend a walkway to the side deck as well as the front door.
3. I need to revisit the pruning I started last weekend. The crape myrtles need a little touch up, and following all my research on Monday I now know THE method and I have a much better idea of what’s possible. Of course, now I see crape myrtles everywhere I go (the ones in Innsbrook are particularly well groomed).
4. If item #1 is completed in full with time enough to spare I’m going to go up to the landfill in Henrico and pick up a load of mulch to cover the areas where the bushes were. On the other hand, I may just wait until the first weekend in September to do the mulching (I’m taking two days off after Labor Day–for a total of five days away from the office–to, er, um, labor about the house and yard).
5. The other item that will more than probably be put off until my working vacation is to remove two trees from the front yard (a juniper sort of thing with an ugly dead spot that is most likely unfixable and some sort of uber-shrubbery-on-steroids type thing that looks like the Amazonian rain forest all by itself). Those two will no doubt require a chainsaw. Once they’re gone I’ll make a couple flower beds where they stood along the curb. Hopefully I can get Mom to come up for a couple of days sometime soon to help me pick and plant flowers in the mulched beds. Yeah, I know I should probably wait to mulch until after the beds are planted, but I honestly don’t know if it’ll happen this year or not and the mulch alone will do wonders for the front of the house.

The bookshelves arrived today and I assembled the two white ones for the kitchen. They look much better than the wire shelving that was out there and once I make the curtains to go along the bottom sections I think they’ll look wonderful. The cabinet space in the kitchen is very limited, so the bookshelves are a welcome option until I can afford to redo the kitchen… something I don’t expect to do for at least the next couple of years.

All this house stuff is incredibly overwhelming. At a few points over the last few weeks since buying this house I’ve gotten caught up in all the things I want to do. I finally realized a couple of days ago that everything doesn’t have to be done at once and that I need to slow down and enjoy this process.

I’ve decided to focus on the projects that will return the biggest bang for the least amount of cash (which is why I’m spending most of my energy on the yard right now). Whenever I turn to the major indoor projects, I think I’ll do something about the flooring. I was standing in what Ginny and I have nicknamed Juliet’s Balcony last night looking at the carpet on the first floor and I was absolutely disgusted. It’s ugly to begin with but consider all the stains and dirt and it’s pretty depressing. The more I think about, the more I think I’ll just do laminate floor throughout the entire first floor. The cost can be reasonable and it’s a project that I could do with a little help from a friend or two. I think I could manage to do it one room at a time to break up the amount of cash I have to sink in to it all at once.