Things have been busy around the Rishel household that seemed to give us a slight break from the technology and social media world! We’ve done some traveling, visitors came into town, we were busy at work, and caught up on life in general {with sweet moments mixed in throughout} these past few weeks.  It was a beautiful weekend here in Orlando and with our first ‘free’ weekend in awhile, we took full advantage of something on our home to-do list: adding landscaping to the front porch.

I have a love/hate relationship with our front porch.  I’m use to the southern porches I grew up on in the south. There are a few steps to walk up to get to the porch, rocking chairs and/or a swing, a few hanging Boston ferns, and of course reading a great book with sweet tea in hand.   Our porch is more like a covered sidewalk {which is nice with all the rain we get in Florida} with a small section where we can place seating. We’ve placed a bench and a small side table in this area for now.

Because this layout was new to me, I was stumped as to what to do with the landscaping and design. Especially without a ‘porch’ to decorate in front of and a reliable place to hang the Boston ferns.  If you know how to hang Boston ferns with non-wood material, let me know!

So here’s the process of transforming part of our front yard starting with a few before pictures.  It’s only the beginning of our landscaping adventure with our front yard and this past weekend proved to be a great start to our yard’s potential.

Without any height change between our yard and the porch, we knew we wanted to create a barrier between the two using shrubs.  It didn’t take long to agree on Boxwood hedges to create a wall full of lush greenery along our front porch space.  We headed to Home Depot and purchased 14 Boxwoods and a few bags of dark brown mulch.

We spray painted where we wanted to remove our grass {and yes, dying grass in some areas due to limited sunlight).  This ensured that we created our flowerbed evenly with the same space throughout.

Once the grass was removed, we spaced the Boxwoods and started planting.  I was even able to recruit my Mom for the day to help which was a blast!

It took no time to plant the hedges thanks to Florida sand and not running into any other tree roots.  We then edged our flowerbed with dark brown edging {it looks great with the house color}.

Last step was spreading the dark brown mulch throughout that we got a great deal on.  The mulch was originally $2.50 a bag and we got it 6 for $10!

We even planted a pop of color in my large teal pot next to our bench to help bring it all together.

Even though the Boxwood hedges are just babies, we can’t wait to see them grow!  We are going to shape them into rounded hedges rather than going with the boxy look.  Next up?  Lights and landscaping along the driveway and a large flowerbed underneath our bay window and down the length of the house. We aren’t done quite yet, but it’a certainly a great start!

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