Now that we have lived with the new foliage and pavers on the courtyard side of the house for six months, we’re pretty happy with the changes. The new path does tend to get strewn with bits of mulch thanks to our California Thrashers, a bird rather similar to the more famous Road Runner but from an entirely different order. They have long curved beaks and like to sift through stuff on the ground, turning up rocks and leaves and such in search of tasty bugs to eat. (You can see many pictures of our resident Thrashers over on my ranch photography site, stega.org.)
We are not quite ready to begin the next few phases of this massive project, but this fall we plan to demolish even more concrete and make another giant mess.
In the meantime, here are some before and after images for comparison. Readers may also note that we have a lovely new planted area between the pretty white fence and the garage. I planned for that way back when we had the driveway repaved. I knew I wanted to soften what was a very harsh, flat space, so when we repaved I just had the crew not put asphalt back down within that strip. And the choice paid off, as some pretty lilac shrubs and a Ginko tree now fill the space. In another few years they should lovely.
So without further ado, here are the pics of the courtyard as of the writing this post, and what it looked like when we first viewed the house back in April 2015 for comparison.
As you will notice, we managed to rehabilitate the tree thanks to a lot of help from our regular tree service. You probably also noticed the large white van sitting in front of the repair bay of the garage. Believe it or not, that’s going to eventually be a race car. No joke. It will be quite a while before that story is ready for publication, though.