Hi I'm new here and love the banter, it's a little scary as well. As to the 'cliche; Good functional use of a property is never 'cliche. It only becomes this way if you do what everyone else does. You could slap any shed on a property and it will hold all your tools. A shed that is built to complement the home is appealing could be used as a potting area, out door office, or all of these things. A patio can be used for placing lawn chairs or it can be elaborated on with things like water features outdoor furniture with lighting such as found in the home. To keep it interesting a wine cooler can be made handy with cabinets for storage. Seating with overstuffed cusions. Pergolas with overhead lighting and the use of dimmer switches. A bat house on the property will keep the mosquitos at bay for many blocks. (hope the neighbors don't mind.) A kids area does not nessesarly mean a swing set it could be a water slide. By the way I don't have kids but was one once. For me the bottom line is how do you want to use your space and how much of your personaliy do you want to project into this space? How much money and time do you plan on putting into the area? Are you planning on staying there until you die or go to a nursing home? Are you planning on getting a good resale? The kids aren't going to be there forever so the area can always be transformed into something else, maybe a small golfing green for putting practice. Decide how best the area should be used with future plans in place. Your needs change as your life does. Know where and how to place the hardscapes the first one is already there. Be smart where the trees are planted and what thier purpose is. Move on accordingly the rest will fall into place, and it won't be 'cleche because it is yours. By the way loved the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Thanks for letting me add my input. Now don't hurt me!

Some kind of deciduous stone fruit, like a cherry. If you are bothered by the fallen petals, you really won't like it if it ever has a good crop of fruit. I was once approached - while gazing upon some Japanese flowering cherry street trees of a locally rare variety - by a duffer with a flat-top haircut and an artificial lawn and no trees or shrubs who hoped I was there to cut the trees down. You see, the fallen petals made "an awful mess" and he just had to get his blower out each year and blow them away. In Japan there is a tradition of setting out blankets in front of flowering cherry trees, having a picnic and gazing upon the falling petals etc. To become comfortable with the situation you either remove the tree to accommodate your existing point of view or change the way you think about it and keep the tree.

We finally got started planting behind the raised bond beam! Talk about a lot of work! We had to build a retaining wall behind the curved portion of the wall with Castlerock, and those things are heavy! I haven't planted anything along the new sundeck, but hope to start that today. We also still have four Pygmy Date Palms for behind the raised bond beam, that we have to plant. Two will flank either side of the CI Date Palm for some added privacy. Here is a close up of the area we planted: I'm super pleased with the look of the ferns. We're lucky in that we only get about 1 hour of direct sun there a day, and it's from about 5:30PM - 6:30PM. Hopefully these Kimberly Queens will thrive there. I looked forever, before finding these bowls for the lower portions of the bond beam. There is a really good nursery, showcased in Southern Living, in a nearby town. They're my go-to place for hard-to-find Texas plants, and they have awesome decorative items. The bowls look amazingly like Oklahoma Wister flagstone! I've planted this combo before. It'll be white in the back (Angelonia), Liriopi in the middle as a perennial, and eventually the purple Scaevola and New Gold Lantana should spill over the front. With the Blue Plumbago in the back, the color combo should look nice. In about a month, it should be totally full. All I'll have to do is change out the annuals each season for color. The fence is in. Now all we have left is the flagstone inlay and the flagstone on the steps and we're done!

Hubs and I were out there tonight hemming and hawing. Even if we give up on the fire pit location, it is still difficult to figure out how to landscape it for both drainage and aesthetics. We'd have to regrade. But the foundation is is open where the porch is so that part would not be able to have dirt piled against a foundation. A basic little depression has formed right about eaves-level so the water is collecting there and not running towards the swale. But if we have to regrade to one inch per foot that is piling 8 inches of dirt against the house to get water to the point were it levels off. That would be like a mini-berm and just doesn't seem logical. If we run a downspout out 8 feet, what's to stop the water from running back towards the house. It has to run into some kind of "depression" which doesn't seem aesthetic in that spot . . .