I’ve always loved topiaries by the front door of a house. It’s just “one of those things” right up there with white hydrangea and yummy-smelling candles. As I’ve mentioned before, my parents live right across the street from us, and I lived in that house since I was 10 years old. I remember thinking when I got older – and actually started paying attention to things like interior design and landscaping – that the house across the street would look nice with topiaries by the front door. Little did I know that 7 years later I’d be married to that geeky guitar player from youth group and living in that very house with our son little dog. Crazy!

Needless to say, I’ve been on the hunt for topiaries. While keeping my eye out, I’ve had a few things on my “topiary wish list”: at least 3-feet tall, double round balls, faux boxwood, and (though not a necessity) pre-lit for Christmas.

While at Tuesday Morning over the weekend, I lucked out! Sitting right in the window were two 3-feet tall, round, double-ball, pre-lit, faux boxwood topiaries… everything on the wish list! Their original price was $200 each, and they were marked down to $99 each. Not bad, considering that other topiaries I’ve been looking at were anywhere between $200 and $400.

I couldn’t get them home fast enough! When I got home, I realized I didn’t have any planters for the front porch, we moved the ones we spray-painted for the carport a while back to the front. We haven’t had plants in them for months (remember, I am a plant assassin), so to the front they went. I set my newfound unkillable leafy friends down in the planters and did a tiny happy dance – in my head.

I love the look of them and the fact that the faux boxwood looks pretty real – even in an iPhone photo!

That’s all fine and dandy, but with the nice, new, tailored-looking topiaries, the rest of the porch is screaming for help. Within the next few weeks, we’re planning on removing the storm door (which is a nasty green color and likely as old as the house!) and installing a new light fixture (which is as equally nasty). That will make a huge difference and add to the curb appeal of our house. After that… landscaping, but I’m getting a little too ahead of myself. One weekend at a time, one weekend at a time.

In other outdoor news, we finally got around to having the trees in the front yard trimmed back. They are gigantic trees, so this a project to be done by the pros. There were huge limbs touching the house, and the shade was choking the dogwood trees. Every time a big storm came, we would hope that one of the big limbs wouldn’t take the gutters off the front of the house. As you can see from the above Instagram photo, everything is cleared out, and there’s a bit more sunlight in our front yard. Three cheers for progress!

• Give our patio furniture a facelift
• Cover, mask, or otherwise hide the ugly air conditioner
• Establish a dedicated “grilling area” on the patio
• DIY doormats for front and back doors
• Pressure-wash the exterior of the entire house
• Create an “entry area” in the carport
• Build a ramp for detached shed
• Paint the stair rails in carport
• Repair the cracks in the carport floor
• Treat or paint carport floor (maybe?)
• Construct or repurpose a large(ish) planter for the patio
• Plant something and actually keep it alive
• Organize and “beautify” the attached shed
• Repair the door to the crawl-space
• Do some minor landscaping
• Scrape and paint the carport ceiling
• Replace the light fixtures in the carport

Whew! With our very busy schedules, that’s one hefty list. It’s also very likely we’ll end up adding even more projects over the next few weeks. Nevertheless, we’re determined to tackle it with a vengeance and get it done, item by item. To light a fire under us, we’re going to give ourselves a deadline for the grand ‘ole Spring/Summer To-Do List of September 4th. Yes, 2012. And hey, since we’re posting it, there’s even more pressure, right? Right ; )

How about you, what projects do you have on your Spring/Summer To-Do List?

Over a year and a half ago we bought two of these planters from CB2…

We actually got them for the patio of our first place (a cozy two bedroom apartment on the other side of town). Back then, silver was our go-to metallic accent color. It matched everything we had, and it went really well with the exterior of our apartment complex. Around the time they came in, we were in the middle of the maybe-we-should-buy-a-house stage. In light of that, we decided to put the patio beautification on hold and store the planters in my parents’ garage. Fast forward a year and a half… The house had been bought, renovations were underway, and we were moving into our new (to us) house. While we were going through the “stuff” we had stored in my parents garage, we stumbled upon our unused planters – STILL in the box! We had totally forgotten about them. To make things even sweeter, we’d been looking to buy planters for the carport! Score!

Btw, it was SUPER hot outside. So the grass looked dead.

Since moving into the house, we’ve turned a page in the accent color book. While silver is a great color that we still use it from time to time, we especially like the way oil-rubbed bronze interacts with our dark floors and bright white trim. All of our door hardware (more about that here) are now oil-rubbed bronze, so it’s only natural that our planters be that color too – especially since they will be going beside the two back doors which were painted a black/brown. For our hue of choice, we went with Rustoleum’s Oil Rubbed Bronze Metallic Spray Paint. That stuff… is awesome. Great color, coverage and the whole nine yards. I wish we could find about a billion other things to use it on!

Obviously, painting plain planters (try saying that 10 times fast!) isn’t rocket science, so I’m not going to get into much detail there. You know the drill… keep the can about 10 inches from the surface, spray in steady back-in-forth motion, slightly overlap each stroke, yada, yada, yada. Just remember, you’re better off doing lots of light coats than a few heavy ones. It gives you better coverage and a streak-free final product. Oh, and we ended up using almost exactly two cans to do both planters.

Now that we had these spiffy “new” planters, we needed to fill them. When picking out flowers, we kept in mind they would be under the carport, so the plants we chose needed to be extremely shade-tolerant. We also wanted to get something self-contained that wouldn’t have to be transferred to a new container. Why? We wanted less fuss. Plain and simple. We’re definitely going to be getting our gardening on in the near future, but buying something that was already in a permanent home just made us feel more comfortable. Taking all of that into consideration, we settled on these beauties…

These are Impatiens. We picked them up at Lowe’s for $8.99 a pop. They haven’t fully bloomed yet, but if they end up looking anything like the tag, we’re stoked. The tag says they will bloom from spring through fall, they are fast growing (funny since they are Impatiens), and they are good to go in the shade. If you have brown thumbs (okay, enough with the puns… we are the Browns… brown thumbs. I know that’s got to be annoying but I couldn’t resist.) like ourselves, be sure to read the tag. The back of the tag is full of info about transplanting, water usage, pruning, fertilizing and such.

The flower pots are pretty shallow so we put some bricks we havd left over from a previous project in the bottom and set them on top. This puts the flowers just above the lip of the planters and keeps the planters from moving around as well!

After a little snip of the hangers and a drink of water, the flowers were all set in their new home…

The plants ended up being the perfect size for these planters. They aren’t too crowded so they have enough room to grow…

Yay for the long lost planters! Now we’re one step closer to completing Operation Carport Prettification. It’s a small step, but it’s a step nonetheless. We’re going to keep our fingers crossed that we have a bright and sunny weekend so we can move on to our other outdoor projects!