Before we did any demo on the porch, we came up with a quick plan of attack as to what we wanted the walkway to look like.
Years ago when we moved in, I had planed for it to be curvy, but years of pinning inspiration got me thinking maybe something modern and straight would look nice. Something like these:
In the end though, I came back to my original idea basically because our house is a large box, the porch is a box, and there are many lines and edges, having curved lines would offset that.
My mom helped me come up with this idea years ago while we planted what we had thought might have been temporary plants along the porch.
We bought some boxwoods along the back and transplanted hostas that were in the back yard to to fill everything in in the front. We also added a rhododendron on the far right side. In the last 5 years, we’ve gone from that, to this:
The boxwoods may need a little cleaning up, but I really like how everything is filled in. We planted the hostas in a staggered formation so there’s now an organic curved line which we will follow when we pour the walkway.
I drew a very rough (not to scale) drawings showing how everything is laid out and the garden areas we plan to fill/add this summer. And, when I say not to scale most everything was fudged, but the deck really is the same footprint as the house – it’s massive!
The rhododendron hasn’t done that great, and I may get 2 clusters of flowers a year if I’m lucky. So, I’m thinking of moving him to the left side of the house, maybe sticking him at the corner of the house where the deck starts. If he doesn’t make it, it’s okay I’m not too emotionally attached to him.
The boxwoods and hostas out front stay, (and I’d feel bad if I didn’t mention at this moment what a pain I made it for Mike to work around those while he’s been fixing the porch – there’s maybe a foot of space to work in, but I begged, pleaded and refused to transplant them during this. He’s amazing for working around them so I get a short reprieve of planting!)
We have to fill in the right side of the porch and while I begged for the boxwoods and hostas to stay, the giant grass was moved for ease of access so I have to find something with height again.
Back to the left side, the red plant is my pride and joy, a $12.50 clearance potted Japanese maple.
It was a splurge purchase at the grocery store 3 years ago, the Mike planted in the most awkward spot by our deck that has blown up this past year.
We’ll move that and fill in that grassy area with some nice flowering plants.
On the other side we got 4 arborvitae from our friends during there front façade remodel, but we lost 2 of them.
Here’s what it looks like from the other angle, and what all 4 of them looked like last year.
We plan to get 2 more to replace the ones that died and create actual beds and fill in with some smaller plants with something to anchor the end where the deck stairs end.
This post is getting way too long, so I’ll end here with an update on the porch. Mike has finished stabilizing the left side, (the worst side by far), and has moved all the temporary posts to the right side and will fill in any more support needed over there.
Once he’s done with the main supports, (under the pillars), we plan to add stone for all the secondary supports (the 2x4’s) to sit on, as well as provide a barrier so we don’t have siding sitting directly on the ground again. We’ve also discussed a faux stone façade on the lower half as well as beefing up the pillar bases, but that adds a large chunk of change to this project. We’ll see what we finalize in the coming weeks.
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