Outdoor Living: It’s GO Time…

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot.

As I said in my last post on my outdoor living series, I talked about the importance of planning ahead. Well, even with all the planning in the world, it comes down to flexibility.

Planning to work on the weekends really wasn’t going to be that challenging except…

-We had a record breaking snow a few week ago- the first time that has ever happened in Arkansas history!

-Rain. RAIN and more rain on the weekends.

-Baseball games, Bear’s miracle league is every Saturday morning.

-My Grandparents have been very ill and a week ago we were afraid we’d loose my Grandfather. It’s been an emotionally difficult time as we wondered every day if we were needing to immediately fly down there to be with my mom during this time. I didn’t realize how much of my strength and energy was tied up in this.

-Our church has a Saturday evening service that we attend.

-I was gone for a week on a business trip to Egg School. (Yes, such a thing exists and Yes, I’ll talk more about it soon.)

and finally…

-WE ARE LAZY AND INEXPERIENCED IN WORKING OUTSIDE.

OK, so once I made my list of excuses not a lot of progress had happened, I really breathed in and out deeply and squared my shoulders. I CAN do this. That sinking feeling I get when I step outside and look at my front bed is fear and I need to overcome it.

To Home Depot. I needed to #digin.

Ben and I took Bear and Bug to the home depot and the first thing that I noticed was the awesome carts with steering wheels that they have there. I mean, it’s hard enough for us to go anywhere with my crazy two boys, so any diversion is very much appreciated. AND they were EXTRA smart in that they have 2 steering wheels, one for each boy. One steering wheel would have just *caused* more issues and screaming, so thankfully the Home Depot consulted a desperate mom with crazy kids when they designed their carts. (Clearly it was mom, because as amazing as they are they are impossible to push and steer effectively which drives my husband crazy but it’s all worth it.)

We cautiously moved to the direction of the outside (scary) section after wasting time looking for the coke machines that used to be on the other side of the store but apparently no one ever bought the pop except me when I shopped there so I had to go back to the front to purchase one, but by the time I got back there was a long, slow moving line so -don’t tell anyone- I just opened it there and bought it when I checked out. We shopped our ways to the outdoor section, Ben grabbing every shiny outdoorsy accessory insisting he needed it. I mean, the shrink up hose looks pretty amazing so perhaps we’ll get that.

Once outside, the feelings of insecurity and “what the heck am I doing here?” came back as Ben and I walked up and down row after row feeling more and more overwhelmed especially as watching the pros who clearly knew what they were doing as they filled baskets with plant after plant. I kept getting drawn to the super complicated plants and wanted to fill my super sunny front bed with all shade plants which, although I’m no expert here, probably isn’t a great idea. I think boxwoods are boring but probably a better idea than a rose bush.

Seeing our vacant faces and hopeless eyes, a kind employee came by to ask if he could help. I’m sure he regretted it as soon as he asked because we pulled out our iPad and showed him photo after photo of our front yard, what kind of light we THOUGHT it might get and any additional details he didn’t ask for but we felt he just might need.

However he smiled and said, “well, it sounds like you need a lot of help- we have a guy here who is amazing and will probably be able to help you a little bit better than I can.” He took us over to a man who was helping someone else and told him these crazy people are super needy like my ex-girlfriend and have crazy children that we were needing some expert advice and could he help us when he had a minute?

As he finished up with the other customer, we looked at all the different border options for our flower bed that we are wanting to create. There were so many options! I wanted the fancy paving stones but they were on the steeper priced side of things and since we had a large area to cover we found some rot resistant landscaping timbers we felt was a better option.. Creating a raised flower bed is more work than I thought it was going to be…

Finally, “Tom” came over and graciously let us show him all the pictures, tell him the dimensions we had guessed on and then calmly started to help us get a plan. He was like a garden therapist.

He told us several shape options and confirmed my opinion of having differing angles instead of a boring rectangle coming straight out of the sides of the house. We sketched out a few ideas and then felt reassured we were not morons, (ok we were but we felt like less of a moron than before…) and armed with our new information, moved forward in the shopping trip. We decided on simple, easy to take care of plants and thought planing a few morning sun annuals might be fun for a pop of color. Overall, we know what we are going to put IN the garden, now just figuring out the building material and size of the raised garden itself is the big hurdle.

At this point we had been at the Home Depot for awhile and even with the steering wheels in the cart, Bear and Bug had moved into the “hitting each other and screaming” phase of shopping. Thank goodness for the child restraints in the carts as Bug looked like he was about to have a brain aneurysm as he strained to get free of the buckle.

That progressed into the “reach out of the cart and try to grab everything within reach” phase of the trip as we went to the lumber section to look at the treated lumber as a border option. They had a few options on the pre-treated to prevent rot boards and I felt indecisive again. This is more of an opinion area and Ben had more ideas on what was a good idea. We browsed and really coudn’t decide on what to get with the kids screaming. We figured that going back another time with an exact list would probably be the best idea for all of our sanity, but with all of our ideas FINALLY firmly in place, we felt great about where we were!