Our big summer project - three months later

We usually have a big outdoor project every year, and this year we chose to put in a big, beautiful shed.  We have limited storage in our garage, so a shed is absolutely necessary.  Here she is newly put up.

We chose to use Tuff Shed because of the 6 inch galvanized steel joists that make it able to sit right on the grass without the expense of a slab underneath.  Unfortunately, Tuff Shed requires a permit to install their sheds, and that meant I had to deal with the village - which sucked.  We have a huge 10ft utility easement on the back property line, and it has to be 5 ft from the side lot line, which meant the shed had to be basically in the middle of our yard.

I didn't want to put it in the easement, because it cost 4k and if they needed to remove it to work on the utilities, we were out of luck.  I agonized over the placement of our 8x12 shed.  Originally, I thought we could put it lengthwise against the side lot line facing our tree...then I realized our side lot line is actually only 10 feet from our house - see orange cup on the stake.  This is in between our houses, with ours being on the right side of the pic.  I guess we've been mowing our neighbor's grass for three years!

With this narrow side yard, the tree trunk would be only 7 or 8 feet from the shed door if we put it along the side line.  No thanks!  We ended up turning it to face front, and landscaped to make it seem intentional that it was so far into the yard.  Spoiler alert - the inspector didn't even measure anything, so all my careful measuring and worry was for nothing!  I was livid!

It was pretty fascinating to watch the installation process.  It was a man and woman, and they had it done in about 6 hours if I remember correctly.  We ran into an issue where I didn't call the diggers hotline before the install date, the Tuff Shed receptionist who scheduled me didn't tell me I needed to, and the village of Palatine requires three foot deep anchors to be attached to all four corners of the shed  You know, in case the all-wood and metal 1 ton building blows away in the wind.  It was quite an ordeal getting them to come back to put in the anchors that we paid for, so that tarnished my experience.  But, they did get in about a week later so we could get inspected and start landscaping.

This shed is absolutely wonderful.  It looks beautiful, it has windows that slide open, and we opted for the built in shelving on the back wall.  Zach loved the shelving until we got it all crapped up!

I upgraded to black hardware, and I'm so glad I did.  We would love to one day get electric run to the shed, and I would probably add two small black 'porch' lights somewhere on the front.  

I love how it looks from the street!  Just like a mini version of our house, minus the brick.  

Once it was up, I bought some foundation plants and came up with a plan to make this thing look less dropped in from nowhere.  

I changed my mind so many times with the landscaping plan!  I realized after we got it installed, that the extra big door can swing all the way back to the window, so we'd have to plant low things where the door swings.  I probably could've gotten two smaller doors that meet in the middle, but we are just working with it.  

I always like when things are new and clean, so I took a formal photo with the shed before all the landscaping, complete with yellow string to help mark it out.  I never get in the photos, so I'm glad I did!

While I loved the clean look of the inside for the first week or two, we had to spoil it all with our junk  We needed tall shovel and rake storage, and lots of heavy duty hooks for our bikes and yard tools.  

We got everything we needed at Home Depot, including the customizable tool rack and pegboard panels.  Warning, I did not tidy up for these photos.  This is my life!

And the other side, minus our bikes which are usually hanging from those ceiling hooks:  

And the lovely view straight on:

Things on the outside started to take shape after I decided to use five grasses along the side lot line to act as sort of a privacy screen.  We had to cut out a lot of grass all around the shed, and the right side had to be extra long.  

I always prefer a curvy planting area, and I worked with the existing circle around the maple tree to make this one big mulched area. 

Zach liked to help with the grass removal, and he found a bunch of cicada shells, so that was a little boy WIN!

Once we got it all in, it was looking so much more natural.  On the right is a Pinky Winky hydrangea, 3 pink phlox moved from another spot in the yard, 5 Northwind switch grasses, a blue star juniper, and native little bluestem grass by the door.  

The left side has another little bluestem, another blue star juniper, a golden barberry, and tall bee balm.  Though, it seems I planted the barberry after this photo was taken!

The grasses along the side should get nice and big, about 2.5 feet around.  I can't wait to see what that looks like!  I also planted tall Joe Pye Weed on either side of the window, they get about 6 feet tall, so it should be a beautiful sight in late summer.

Now, we are into November, and here is what the shed is looking like now:

I love how everything looks like it was always there.  We plan to put some tall evergreens behind the shed to block the unfortunate view of our neighbor's unmowed yard and satellite dish.  I also appreciate how the foliage of my plants are changing with the season.  I need to pay more attention to selecting plants with fall color, rather than putting nothing but beautiful summer flowers in!

This little barberry in the front of our house makes me so happy!  I plan to put in more shrubs that have that beautiful fall color next year. 

One other thing I did this summer was overhaul the planting area in the back corner of our yard.  I'll share that project in a different post!  One last view of the shed from our back door:

So happy to have it installed!

Recapping the landscaping

Do you ever respond to an email and then realize later that you never sent it?  Or read a text message and mentally respond but never ACTUALLY respond?  I do that all the time.  I did that with this post about our front landscaping.  Half composed, photos all renamed and ready to go, but never posted.  I swear my mind is shot!  Anyway, to commemorate the end of summer, here is the work we did this summer... 
We had a nice big bare spot in the front, where a huge pine tree used to be before it was knocked down in a storm last summer.  Before:

We started by marking the area we wanted to be our planting area with spray paint, then went to the nursery to pick out our plants. 

We knew we wanted some larger foundation plants around the edges and then room in the middle for perennials and smaller shrubs. 

The beauty of our yard is being able to expand this area as the plants grow.  We did NOT do a great job of weeding, removing all the grass, tilling the soil.  We also didn't edge the area with anything, so all summer we were picking weeds and grass out of the bed.  Dumb.   Ashford picked up our slack by pulling rocks out of the planting area. 

We ended up with a dappled willow, two grasses, three weird perennials with little pink ball flowers, a few purple salvia, a dwarf evergreen, two orange rocket barberry, and a bunch of hostas that were elsewhere on the property.  We also planted a tiger eye sumac that my mom gave us, and it looked really sad from the transplant.    

Fast forward to a month later, and the space is just boring....so we went and picked up 400 pounds of flagstone to make a nice little feature on the back end of the bed.  The star would be the sweet globe blue spruce on a grafted trunk that I just had to have.  

We cut a 6 foot circle into the ground, and dry fit the stones.  We had just enough to do a two-high circle.

This project was so easy, the low profile means that there was no adhesive necessary and we can always move things around or add on as we like.  We would love to get flagstones all the way around, but I'm not sure we can afford it! 

The day after this pic was taken, we replaced the severely burned dappled willow with the golden falsecypress in the bottom of this photo, and we also planted a smaller 'dark horse' weigela.   Here is the way it was all looking in July.   

And here is the way it looks today.  Wow, those grasses exploded!  I underestimated how large they would get, and while the falsecypress is eventually going to be huge, right now it is dwarfed.  I may be moving those grasses at some point. 

Also, can we just say again how much better the house looks painted?!  So then there was this side area where another tree fell down last year (I saw a picture, it was like the apocalypse) on the other side of the driveway. 

We planted seed in the bald spot to the right, but the bigger dirt pile needed a planting bed.  We also wanted a tree, so we went to pick up a nice 'snowdance' lilac tree.

 It is always a tricky thing to plant a tree.  The depth has to be perfect, and there is a small graft on the bottom of the trunk that needs to be exposed to the sun, it was quite a task.  When it was finally in there, we filled in the rest of the area with additional hostas, some coral bells, lilies and coneflowers. 

I decided to put Glimerace the frog in this area, the neighbors think he's cute and Ashford likes him. 

We had a lot of overgrown stuff on the east side of the house, but I thought I could work with everything but the tall dumb weed on the right side. 

It seemed to be about three different weeds that had grown into tree size. 

It looked a lot better after we cut that one down, of course there is still a stump there.  And we have trimmed all the other stuff, I just don't have a picture.  I've considered cutting it all down, but I sort of like how tall they are - and removing all the stumps would be a pain.     

So, that is the bulk of what we did in the yard this summer. 

Can-do cannas

Last summer I bought some Canna Lilies.  This is the best picture I could find of them in 2009, which is terrible.  One pot was the red-verigated 'Tropicanna,' and the other was just a nice orange-flowering one with classic green leaves.  Thanks to my mom, I didn't let these annual plants die over the winter.  I harvested the bulbs, cleaned all the dirt and leaves off, and stored them in my basement in a box. 

Come April (which really should have been late March), I had several canna bulbs to plant in quart containers.  The most important thing is to make sure the right end pf the bulb is pointed up, and that you use good potting soil, not garden soil.  Mom came over to help me get them planted, and then I got to put all my little bulbs in the sunny window until they started to spout. 

Only two of the 6 Tropicannas spouted, but I got 4 out of 6 of the other variety to leaf out.  Memorial Day weekend, we finally planted them in their planters out on the patio.  It was so impressive to me that only two months in the pots created almost perfect root balls!  Check it:

Unfortunately, we didn't have any potting soil at the house so I used garden soil mixed with lots of peat, sand, and hummus to help with drainage.  Straight up garden soil doesn't do well in containers because it's compacts and doesn't allow the water to drain as well as lighter potting material. 

I also picked up some sweet little rolling plant stands to make moving them around the patio easier.  I may spray them black, and possibly take off the price tag.  If I get around to it. 

If my mom hadn't told me to store the bulbs over the winter, I would've had to re-buy these for over $20 this year.  I feel like I just got free plants, and I can't wait to see if they get just as big as when I purchased them last year.  Thanks for your plant wisdom, mom!