Nothing like a little landscaping to rid your front step of skinks.

Its a proven fact that I am horrible at blogging about our house projects, as I nearly always forget to take a before picture.  So let me paint you a word picture of what this area in the front of our basement window looked like, for those of you who haven't been over for cookies yet.  It was a giant rock garden.  Oh, so many rocks.  Some that were quite large and heavy, all the way down to gajillions of little pebbles filling in all the little spaces.  So, so many rocks.  And then there were some really nice, old wagon wheels.  And then this metal silhouette thingy of maybe a cowboy and a horse?  I can't even remember.  We threw it away really quickly.

So over the last couple of weeks, Brad, Willa, Mom and I removed alllllll the rocks.  And pulled all the grass that was growing in the rocks.  And then dug up the weird brick border thing that was buried halfway underground.  Then we put down some of that black fabricy stuff to hopefully prevent the grass from growing again and planted 2 very pretty azalea bushes, threw on about  7 bags of wood chips, and made a nice border out of some edging stones.  It looks so much better now and as an added bonus - the weird family of legged snake creatures has moved out of the area now that there aren't all those rocky crevices to hide in!  Granted, we weren't aware of the creatures until we started the project and disturbed them.  But its nice to know that they are gone:)  During the project, Willa also discovered a love for worms.