Design Ideas

Here's what Mike and I have to work with, a picture from our home when we bought it in 2002. We haven't done very much with the front yard, so it pretty much looks the same except the foundation plantings have filled in quite a bit since then.

I've been working on a design with Mike and came up with a drawing, with lots of notes in the margins...

The top indentation is our porch with one step, the bottom rectangle is our parking strip and above that the sidewalk. I'm thinking of border plantings two to three feet wide, four raised beds, and a water feature in the middle. The red line would be a fence and the green lines are the underground plumbing for the drip irrigation. And all around it are my measurements and calculations. While it is not perfectly symmetrical, it's not hard to see the Western formal garden design!

I've also been searching the internet for inspiration and put together a design collage...

Here you can see all my thoughts for the garden: raised beds, picket fences, an arbor in the front and center (maybe triangular to match our home's peak), bluestone for paving, some sort of water feature and I would like to paint our front door, though I don't know which of these colors I like best. I already know I want to paint our porch pillars brown to match the trim instead of that ugly maroon, so I Photoshop'ed our home.

Anyways, I hope these ideas will guide us!