Planning the Landscape

Wahoo!!! Back to blogging and loving it :)

It has been a wonderful busy 7 days, and over the next week, I'll be catching you up on all the happenings here at "too Blessed to Stress."

First of all, I should explain that last Monday was hubby and my 7th anniversary! {love ya babe!} We had a wonderful evening spent with family. It was a great celebration!

But since we couldn't find time in the schedule to get away from work {not even for an overnight getaway near by} we decided to spend our evenings that week together doing what ever suited our fancy - just NO work allowed! It was great fun! The only other requirement was to only do things together... and so I took a break from blogging to meet our treaty agreements.

I know that hubby totally would have let me blog and not cared one bit, but I wanted to hold up my end of the deal since he was taking time away from extra work projects to be with me. As a dear friend told me in her congratulation email, "Make him feel like he's #1!" And you know what? It was so great to just spend time looking after my sweetheart, talking, and going all the places we never get to during a regular work week.

See that brownish slab? That was the previous patio, and half of it was a ginormous step!

One of the things we did was get a jump start on our summer plans for the backyard. Last year we were blessed to have a friend use our patio as his "practice ground" for learning how to stamp concrete patios. The previous "patio" was no more than a slab of cement that wouldn't even fit one round table with two chairs comfortably.

Not conducive to our backyard entertaining desires!

My feet after sweeping off the first layer of color!

After several months of waiting, prepping, and planning, the new patio was poured, stamped, colored to look like slate/flagstone, and sealed. Just in time for one get-together before the rain came. So you can imagine how antsy we are to get out there this year and really enjoy the backyard for a whole summer.

Patio waiting for sealer... just begging for comfy furniture and a house full of company!

And if I could have you all over for a get-together I totally would! Time to start wispering to your hubby those two sweet words..... "road trip!"

As part of our anniversary celebration, we went to a local nursery to scout out ideas for new plants and flowers and dream about the big ticket items like a fancy arch, pergola and ginormous leaf fountain.

Every year we go to the nursery to plan and come away with great ideas that are all too easily forgotten, but this year we wised up and went in with a game plan.

After making a drawing of the yard with {pretty much, alomost, completely} exact dimensions, we wandered around with a notebook full of ideas, taking pictures of the plants and then a close up of their names and prices.

Not only did it save me from having to scribble down a bunch of illegible chicken scratch trying not to forget the name, cost, and color, it was a great way to visualize where everything would go once we were standing in the backyard later that day.

So simple! Why had we never thought of that before?

Do you have a tip {or two or three} for summer backyard planning and gardening that you could share? Are you landscaping this year? Planting a veggie garden? Enjoying the neighbor's yard? :) Share below... I always love new ideas from my wonderful readers!

All photos taken by yours truly.