Now that we have lived with the new foliage and pavers on the courtyard side of the house for six month, 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 will be demoing even more concrete and making another giant mess.
In the mean time, here are some comparison before and after images. Readers may also note 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 now some pretty lilac shrubs and a Ginko tree 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 as well as what it looked like when we first viewed the house way 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.