remove those shudders,,,I mean shutters! (far too thin for your windows anyways). I love both of the designs, above. The only other thing I would change is that siding color. Or the brick color. the two of them together don't go well, IMO. if you painted the bricks in white, or gray, or even black, then it would look awesome. Imagine your brick gray washed like this:instead of your shutters, I'd do a 1x3 simple wood trim around the windows and paint it black. I'd also replace your thin white poles w/beefier cedar posts. something simple, similar to these: here's a quick photo shop...then you could replace the red mulch w/the black bringing in some natural wood w/the black/white and gray looks so nice. if you don't want to paint brick, I'd still do beefier posts, but paint them white. I'd pick a warmer siding color to go w/the red brick. or, paint the siding this dark charcoal color. see how nice it looks next to the red brick? had to show you this color combo w/the black slate ledger stone and the black/gray/white

P.S. I had to run off to meet someone earlier so kept my response very brief. I just got home again... A few additional comments: - what you're seeing in my blog pages that I linked above is the result of almost 20 years of working a bit at a time - I didn't have a specific plan drafted; I just had a general vision of what I wanted it to look like. We bought this house/property in spring 1999, did an extensive renovation and addition to the house over the summer and moved in in the fall. Other than laying down some sod, gardening didn't start until spring 2000. In the backyard 'woodland' we started under the pines to see what we could do; when that seemed to work reasonably well, we moved on the next year to the wet corner area and the start of the south plantings under the oak. The next year we extended that further towards the house and also realized the bed under the pines needed to be extended towards the house to balance the planting we were doing on the south side, so we started with the grass removal for that in the fall - and on and on it went with one thing leading to another.... (I used to have year-by-year pictures on Picturetrail but I stopped using it/paying for it so they are now archived and not available on-line or I could show you the changes the garden went through....) So don't try to do everything at once unless you have a lot of bodies to do the work! If you don't plan on staying in the current house for long, concentrate on creating a nicely shaped lawn area near the house and woodland-edge beds along the edge of the woods. Continue to grow the grass - if it survives but shade and leaf-fall would likely doom it quickly! In which case, leave the leaves on the ground and focus on keeping the paths clear and creating a pleasant network of paths, plus adding some shade-tolerant shrubs and other easy-care plantings. If you plan to stay there for many years, take your time to imagine what it can be like ideally for you and then work one section at a time and see where it leads. Have fun with it!

We are designing the rock garden into a tiny sliver of available space, between a walking path and a stone circle with a statue in the middle. Hopefully, the constraints on space are clear from the photo below. This area has clay loam soil, and it was not draining well, so succulents never thrive there. We decided to build a raised mound, and for mostly aesthetic reasons we used desert soil (i.e., the gritty mix) for those mounds. The tubes running throughout this area are an irrigation drip system. To be honest, they installed too many tubes, and they made those 1/4 inch tubes drip lines instead of distribution tubes. So the design is wasteful. It would have made far more sense to install one or two 1/4 inch distribution tubes, and then branch off those to specific plants. Eventually, those tubes will be partially buried by the soil and less visible on the surface.

I need to see how this space relates to the house . I have never heard of those structures before so not sure what can and can't be done with those .Even a rough drawing of the whole yard can be helful here . Snap shots with no context do not really help.