Don't Let Horrible Curb Appeal Scare You Away!

Laura Lanier
by Laura Lanier
We looked at several houses and always liked this one the best. Our agents thought we were nuts! It had been on the market for over a year, priced well and was in a really nice small town with 1.25 acres, 1235 Sq. Ft...so why were there no offers? Could it have been because of the "Curb Appeal"? Did people drive by and keep on going because it looked so bad? Or was it because of one of the dozens of fire ant mounds?
This was the lot next to house..
It had been used as a horse pen at one time...we don't have horses. As soon as we got moved in we went to Lowes and bought some Fire Ant Killer...choppers, wire cutters, pole saw, and all kinds of other tools and got to work..
Tons of trees, poison ivy, oak and weeds!
We had to cut the wire then remove the poles, then we had to dig up all kinds of roots...this took a couple months to complete..some poles were so rotten they broke off, came in handy when filling in holes...
Chain Link Fence - real mess
We wanted to keep our chain link fence...so we had to pull all the weeds out...did I mention the previous owner had dogs so they added dog wire to the fence? The bottom and the top...we had to cut all that stuff out all around the yard...We did remove some of the chain link next to the house since it had 2 trees growing through it and we could not get them out.
One year and lots of sweat later...
This is the front and side of the house with the fence gone. We found a crepe myrtle hidden in all that mess and it is doing great. We added a couple more. We tried to save all 17 cedars, however they had been planted too close together and not deep enough. A snow storm pushed them over and we had to remove all but 2 of them..
Chain link looks so much better!
The ugly little buildings are not ours...the town owns that little piece of land behind our lot, if they were ours we would have painted or something..we plan to plant some bushes/flowers to hide them.
We love how it looks now!
We may put a flower bed up with the cedars...maybe next year we can put in the budget. We still have to do something with that big grass plant on the edge of the property but we did one in the back and it took days so not ready for another one of those..
Across lot to house - early spring.
We are so happy with how this has turned out. We got rid of all the fire ants...we still check and the 1st sign of a mound we treat it. Don't let a ugly yard scare you away if you love the house and can see it's potential. It was and is a lot of hard work but so worth it. We still have a ton of stuff to do so better get to it:)
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  • Patricia Patricia on Jun 15, 2015
    Beautiful.....reminds me of when we lived up North but here in Florida I can not keep a beautiful lawn.
    • Laura Lanier Laura Lanier on Jun 15, 2015
      @Trink1128 Thank you. We have been really lucky so far with a lot of rain so everything is nice and green.
  • Daisy'smum Daisy'smum on Jul 07, 2015
    Little bit of imagination and a lot of hard work. That's all it takes. Well done.
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