Glad to have you here, Tracy! You don't have to just wait - that's why you get annuals and pots. View this year as a prep year that will make the remainder of your gardening years in this house more successful and rewarding. One other thing you can do this summer besides annuals & pots is to work on improving your soil. Once we are well into summer and you know what you have (& you may want an experienced gardener to walk around your garden with you to help figure out what are weeds and what are plants worth keeping) you can plant a cover crop to turn in come fall or start working in compost (does your town have a composting program where you can pick up finished compost free or cheap?) or even just top dressing with compost. I really think that the best thing you can do to have a successful garden is to start with good soil, and that's always easier before you plant, amending whole beds with organic matter rather than just adding it to planting holes which tends to restrict root growth. If you can't get compost, look up lasagna gardening or sheet composting. Any organic matter added will be to the good, particularly in your sandy soil. Watching your garden for a season while planting temporary plants (that's where annuals and pots come in) will help you get a feel for light levels, moisture levels (are there areas that stay damp to gooey all year or other areas that are powder dry in high summer?) while giving you time to decide what you want from a garden as others have suggested along with knowing a bit about how you will use the yard. Where will the BBQ be? Do you want a patio in sun or shade? Do you need a play space for kids? Do your pets have favorite places to run, sleep or dump? (Not good places for plants!) Where do folks take short cuts around the yard (don't try to plant there or else give them stepping stones to cross the garden.) Around here early fall is the best time to plant since warm soil and cooler air coupled with regular rain make it easier for the plants to settle in. You can spend your summer like KPaquette, visiting other gardens and deciding on plants and styles you like. (Take a camera and a notebook so that if photos are allowed you can have records of plants you like, & be sure to take good notes &/or make sketches to keep track of ideas and plant names.) Another good source of ideas is your local public library and book stores, as they often have great eye candy that will get your creative juices flowing. Finally, there are frequently sales in the fall, so you'll get more bang for your buck as long as the plants are healthy. Some ideas for this year's dappling - Coleus comes with red or green or yellow leaves (usually some combination) and likes shady areas. Outdoors, it makes a great pot plant that you can then cut back before the first frost and keep it all winter as a sunny window sill plant. There are many Salvias that may or may not be hardy for you (but aren't for me) like Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' which grows well in a large pot and attracts humming birds. Scarlet runner beans are an annual vine that will twine up a trellis or strings. They have screaming red flowers that the hummers love and you can eat the beans as green beans if picked young or harvest the mature pods for dried beans. Nicotiana in a self-seeding annual that has red, pink, white, or chartreuse flowers with heavenly late afternoon and night-time scent.

So you are planting right by the buses? Is it your property? I am no expert, but I am voting for the Green Giants. Fastest growing and screening. Just take mature size into consideration and make sure they won't over grow their space.

The guy at Wittus is very nice and helpful and will happily answer questions. You do not need to have a full masonry chimney on the outside. We have brick/granite on the front, wood framing and insulated pipe out from the firebox through the roof. The firebox is zero clearance, but there are requirements for intake air and the heat vents. Our heat vents go into the next room over and to our 3rd floor office/bedroom. Ours is a center chimney, so we had to jump through some hoops for intake air. I think it is easier if you are on an outside wall. My husband says the firebox and insulated pipe was around $10,000 several years ago, but a large part depends on how much you save by not doing the full masonry chimney, construction, shipping and other variables. It was cheaper for us than a new center chimney fireplace, but we already had 1700’s ballast brick for the front/sides and found a young mason to do the interior ballast brick very reasonably. Our contractor had no problem figuring out the specs and getting it ready for the mason quickly. Check it out. We absolutely love ours.

Ilex x meserveae, Blue Princess Holly. Ilex × meserveae BLUE PRINCESS - Plant Finder (missouribotanicalgarden.org)