Planning for flower bed #1

One of the things that Superman and I have quickly discovered is that with the house and making updates to it, it is all about baby steps. We know this, we still find it frustrating, but we know it. We are slowly starting to embrace the baby steps. The next baby step is working on boxing in our flower beds in the front. Unless we can find the landscaping timbers cheaper at a local lumber yard, we will be starting off by just doing one of the flower beds at the end of the month when we have friends coming over to help. However, the first step is figuring out how many we need! A couple weeks ago during Home Depot's "Spring Black Friday" sale we got some of the landscaping timbers (granted we didn't realize they were on sale until we checked the prices online recently- oops!) so that we could use the timbers to figure out how many we needed for the length and the height that we're going to make the bed.

So today I did a very quick, and I do mean very quick, dig around the edges of the flower bed so that I could lay down the timbers we have to try to get the idea. The result was this :

As you can see, Snickers wanted in the picture too

How you can tell we are clearly just trying to get an idea- there was no attempt to cut the timbers to size :-) 

The whole point of this endeavor was to see how timbers we need to buy- we don't want to have to make multiple trips because we don't get enough. The end result will have all the top edges even with the top of the bottom step leading up to the door. We've figured we're going to need 18 more timbers, round it up to 20 for extras in case of cutting mistakes, etc. once that is done we'll lay down a barrier so that weeds can't grow up through the bed, add more dirt and then re-mulch. Right now the mulch is shredded leaves from our backyard. We still have plenty of leaves to shred- and some already shredded hanging out in the back. We also have a pile of brush to shred. So we'll have to buy the timbers, hardware for attaching it all together and the dirt- hopefully we'll have enough leaves and brush to shred for the mulch. Hopefully in June we'll be able to do the other side. I don't expect us to plant any flowers this year, but you never know, we may be able to squeeze that in as well.

Of course, watching me do the small amount of digging and laying out the timbers was exhausted work for our little hound dog, so now she is chilling out on the sofa with her Daddy, with only her nose sticking out.

\