Weeds on Weeds on Weeds

So awhile back, I shared a picture of our front yard:

However, I must admit I didn't give y'all a complete picture of how the front yard actually looked.

From the street, our house was hidden behind a wall of overgrown shrubs.  Technically, they weren't even proper shrubs, they were weeds. 16 foot tall weeds. And they had been like this for years. I remember walking by this very house 4 years ago when I lived just up the street and noticing how overgrown the place looked.

You obviously couldn't see the house from the street but our view from the porch wasn't so hot either. The portion of weed-shrub at eye level was very sparse, with all the greenery being at the top.

View looking to the street from our porch

So I checked with my landlord, who checked with the homeowners, who said it was fine to trim them down to fence level. Alright, alright, alright! I can work with that! My initial plan was to leave some of the shrubs around the gate, trim down the middle on both sides and leave the tall bushy shrub on the far right to help block the view from the main road.

So on Father's Day (yea, this project has been a long time in the making), after Branch and his dad left for golf, I pulled out the pair of hedge shears I borrowed for my mom and got to work.

After a few hours, I had this:

And I started to get concerned I may have bitten off more than I could chew.

My mom offered to come over and help and brought a tree pruner with her. By the time Branch got home from golf, the area I had been working on looked like this....

Apparently it was going to be one of those projects where things were going to look worse before they were going to get better.

That night I tossed and turned, having some serious anxiety about if we should have even taken this on and what we could do to make it better. The original plan was to leave some of the shrubs near the gate but at this point, it looked like a missile had gone right through the shrubs. Not only that, but it was way more work than I originally planned it would be. We invited our friend, and professional landscaper, Alex Blackman over to give us his opinion. He whipped out his chainsaw and mowed the whole thing down.

Victory! We can see the house! Sure, there was two truckloads worth of weed remnant to remove but this was progress!

Once we got the "shrubs" down to fence height, just as I feared, there was no foliage left. This wasn't going to work. New plan. Rip out the shrubs and replace them with new, pretty, actual plants-not-weeds-shrubs.

So Easton and I hopped in the truck and headed for my new favorite nursery, Bates Nursery in Whites Creek.

To be continued...