I would like to ask everyone's help on my front landscaping. We bought the house and the front landscaping was full of wild flowers that were just too much for this house. So now they're gone.

Here's a picture of the front of our house after we took out the wild flowers and bushes and rocks...

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The tree behind our garage is now gone too. It was diseased pretty badly, and falling all over our house, so we removed it so we don't run into future problems. It was double pin-oak.

This is a picture of our side yard. This is actually what our front landscaping looked like. We still haven't fixed this problem yet, but the brush is all gone - rocks are still there. You can see the problem we have with our neighbor's fence that is all kinds of discolored (going to need to hide that eventually...

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Ok - now you've seen the problem. Now add that my husband and I do not have green thumbs at all. We've always lived in apartments, and we just watched gardening shows on tv. Thought we would give it a try - how hard could it be! hahaha

Well.. here's what we ended up doing. Mistake #1 was making a Burning Bush the center of attention. Found out later that it lost it's leaves. So, this month, we'll be moving it. The grass in front of the burning bush is gone now - in fact, topsoil is covering the entire area, but having got mulch yet. The border is curvy - thought it would look "different" from our neighbors bland landscaping. The plan was to have bushes in the back of the area and put flowers and other colorful plants/flowers in the front. Our yard is very curvy (in a cul-de-sac), so that's why we did this. On the right of the picture - there's not much room. My neighbor's yard begins right away, so I only have one big side yard and that's by the driveway, and the backyard goes into a V-shape to the very back of my yard. It's strange how my land goes. The missing grass areas in front of the border are filled in now too.

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We also did this...

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We put up a railing, and it's primered and painted white. We're putting up a flowerbox on it this spring. We didn't know any better about the concrete we put in to hold the railing up and also to fill in a dirt area - that was completely our mistake - should've used cement, but we just kept thinking concrete, so that's what we ended up buying when we were actually thinking of cement! We know about the grading problem, but we can't do anything to fix that right now. Our step is slowly detaching itself from our house, and the railing is holding it in place. Yes, oh yes - what a mess!

All I want to do is make everything look beautiful, colorful, balanced, and have most of it look like that all year long. I have time to fool around with upkeep, but I don't want to have to take a great deal of time keeping it up since I don't have tons of time to devote to that. My neighbors are just wondering when it's going to get done, and what it's going to look like - and all I want to do is give it a "WOW" factor.

Help! Help! Help me make it not look like I'm an amateur! I'm learning, and still having fun with doing everything, but I need this project to come to a close.

We were thinking about putting in Compact Japanese Holly under the windows, but I really wanted to have some height in the landscaping, but not to block our window views. We like fall colors, so we were going to try to incorporate that into our landscaping. In the future, we're changing our roof and shutters to a dark graphite color, and our siding to a cream color. I would like to have a red front door, but my husband doesn't like that idea.

Ok - so that's it. Past, present, and future hopes.

Any advice (detailed advice) greatly appreciated!!

-Deci

Thanks in advance!