Outdoor spring renovations

If you refer back to my very first post, you'll see a few of my spring/summer outdoor projects for 2015. One project I am excited about is building a retaining wall around our tree in our front yard. Here are a few photos of what our front yard had going on when we bought the home in May 2014. Not so impressive.

Here is a photo of my quick attempt last summer to make it look nicer than the over grown bushes and excess mulch. . This summer I want to make a more permanent change.

Here are a few of my inspiration photos! I want to go with a gray toned stone because my plan is to white wash the brick on the home to tone it down and make it not look so cookie cutter (every other house in our neighbor is brick, white siding, and black shutters... Boring!).

After some price hunting, I finally settled on the Belgian wedge in quarry gray from Menards. This week it was on sale for .98¢ a piece, normally $1.49. The diameter of the tree ring is roughly 6ft and took about 80 blocks to build a ring two blocks high. Last summer we had a difficult time mowing between the under tree mulch and flower bed mulch because they were so close, hence why I scaled the size down from the initial mulched area. It took me about 3 hours to complete by myself and that included a trip back to Menards to get an additional 50 blocks, because I ran out. I will share an updated photo once our grass starts coming in and our tree blooms. Next outdoor project: lining the flower bed with inlaid pavers!