Honey, the real BEFORE was only viewable with a machete in hand. hehehehehe.....but this is what it looks like with all but the azalea stumps up and the passion vine seedlings beginning to crawl up the wire pot arbor. I have to remind myself that it was just last spring we began to do things with the back forty. Pretty raw, huh. And hmmm, let me find the Fried Bananas--I'm most impressed with how it grew while I was busy potting up the new guys. This next picture shows the "allee" or walkway between the high privacy fence and the south end of the Teahouse. It is the place I've moved the smaller hosta, intend to put a shelf up on the fence for eye level viewing and gardening chores to be easier. This view shows where the only three grounded hosta are located, the QUARANTINED TRIO. Wouldn't you know they look perfect this year? I'm hoping they do NOT have HVX, but what are the odds the first two I bought from Lowes are clean? Like IGNORANCE IS BLISS, maybe the angels knew I was totally ignorant when I did it and it saved me--but give me a couple of quarantine years to find out. The area for the shade cloth is 25 feet wide from fence to fence--our "back forty" was a strip of land we bought from our neighbor, 25 feet deep and 100 feet wide, and this south end of it is between two fairly large pecan trees, and shade is rather sporadic and intense as the growing season progresses. Meanwhile I have a dump truck load of half bark half soil in my driveway which I'm waiting to move once the PVC posts are dug in. No sweat, right? hmmm, well, three holes with more roots than you can imagine. If we do it in one day, it will be a miracle. I'm really thinking we should call the fence company to bring that big auger and at least do the holes. I'm too old for this....and so is DH. He's got to last a long time, you know. Oh, a pirogue is sure nuff a flat bottomed boat. Double ended. NOT an indian-style canoe. This one happens to be out of fiberglass so it will last forever. My bro, who is in Louisiana, gave it to me after it drifted up to his house in a hurricane. I worked down in Louisiana as a boat captain for 20 years, I forgot folks in other parts did not know a word so common to me. So JonnyB, you thought I was filling up a nice pierogi.....how nice!!!!Ohhhh. As they say on the bayou, Ah'd lak sum a dat, me!! Here it is, at the north end of the back forty, between rows of blueberries.

Hopefully you can get advice from the other experts on this forum. I'm just a gardener so I don't know much about how to do what you are asking. But to me, the wooden deck seems a bit out of place and disconnected from the look near the front steps. If you need to have a patio out front, to make it work, you'd have to somehow connect the pieces together to make it cohesive. Right now, the raised wood patio, plus the diamond shaped grass/patio stone pathway, plus the concrete walkway with gravel edging appears disjoint due to the mixture of materials. Hopefully the other experts will give you some ideas, but I would guess that you'd have a better chance of connecting the pieces if you at least removed the gravel on the left side of the walkway (closest to the wooden deck) and re-sod along that side. Then you might have a better chance of making a pathway from the front steps to the wooden deck that makes sense. That said, if I was you at this point, I wouldn't make any changes until you get a plan (although I would start to remove that concrete? edging around the bed that housed the birch tree since no matter what, that bed with the birch tree that jutted out should be removed and sod added in its place)

Grover! Thanks again so much for your imagines! They help a bunch!!! Also, thank you for your patience posting them... Houzz sure doesn’t make it easy! Now I don’t think i care for the almond. In the sample book they gave us.... none seem to be what I’m looking for I guess. I could stick with white but this post’s replies have me nervous that’s the wrong choice. I do agree a door that blends with the house looks nice/bigger (per the taupe imagine above). Our garage doors are quite old and the right one has a dent in 2 places where it has been hit before. I did ask the installer if we could just change out the bottom dented one & top rows as we would like windows along the top. He said we couldn’t. Also, not important in this post but we need new openers...I swear these ones are from 1973!!! Haha.

This thread devolved just as quickly as someone didn't want to hear the truth. For a bystander to jump in and call the truth-teller a jackass added fuel to the fire. And then wacokid misinterprets who the recipient of the name-calling is, as it was not the OP. When someone says, "Any help would be greatly appreciated," one would think they're open to hearing anything that helps ... even if it is not 100% a direct answer to their initial question. Sometimes help hurts, but it's only temporary. If it's paid attention to and ends up where something gets fixed, it's "constructive criticism." Gardengal's observations are the same ones that came to my mind within 3 seconds of looking at the picture. Why would someone want to repeat the errors that a previous homeowner made, just because that's what they did? ... especially when it's so EASILY fixed?? Doing that does not make sense to me. I'm pretty sure that however the walk was tamped was not with a steel tamper -- the tool made for the job. So the walk would not be as compressed as it should be. The easy way out is to let it settle over some time (for a few months or as long as one can tolerate it), pull up the blocks, add more sand and reset the blocks, tamping them in again. But wouldn't it be better to fix the layout and at least make it functional? Move the walk over, widen it and fill in the wedge next to the curved walk with a little concrete. (A walk this small would be just as easy to make of 4" nominal thickness solid concrete for more durability.)