Driveway Make-Over

Liam and I are working on our curb appeal. Hopefully this will help our market value in order to eventually take out a home equity line to do major renovations on the bath/kitchen this winter. We were unable to get approved for one so far, due to the number of foreclosures in the area leaving our house under value even after $20,000 in repairs.

(sigh)

Well, it makes me want to work that much harder.

As far as the yard goes, I've started small, and will work my way around the yard.

One of the first eye-sores when driving into our drive-way were all the wild grasses and weeds along the side fence. Liam and I sprayed them with weed killer probably two months ago, and then dug them up a month later...but then another month went by and the weeds began popping up again. I finally had it with the weeds, and dug them all up again on Tuesday. It took me about three hours.

I decided that I would need to lay down something to prevent weeds from growing back along the fence. I searched forums and came up with the "newspaper method" for underlayment to mulch and river rock. That sounded a lot easier than cutting up plastic sheeting or stapling down landscaping fabric. It also sounded much more economical of course, and not too bad for the environment afterall.

So, Tuesday night Liam and I picked up a couple bags of whatever they had at WalMart. We discovered some Lava Rock and some really nifty rubber mulch. Rubber mulch doesn't weather like regular mulch, so supposedly you don't have to mulch every year, it's also 100% recycled material, and does not mold or rot. It's soft, and doesn't cause splinters. It's also resistant against WEEDS! I thought well that sounds terrific.

It gave me some ideas. I did a test run with the Lava Rock (a red earth tone rustic rock) and the rubber mulch in red as well. It looked great, so on Wednesday evening, we picked up a load of Lava Rock & rubber mulch.

Today is Thursday, and I've spent several hours today papering the old weeded area, with newspaper and water (so it wouldn't blow away.) then installing the Lava Rock and rubber mulch.

It looks fantastic! I have to say that I'm not really a red person, and wasn't even sure if I was going to like the red, but after seeing it all layed out...it adds a lot of drama, a lot of elegance and richness to the lawn already. Now our driveway is more GLAM, like riding the red carpet.


















Hopefully this will actually last the entire time we live in the house, so I never have to do it all again. I have faith in this rubber mulch! Again, I wish I had a better extreme before and after. The weeds used to be 2 ft tall there. Oh well...you can imagine.