Last week, we planted privacy trees in our yard. And I don’t think we’ve ever been happier to dig 47 holes in humid, 90 degree weather. That’s because all that digging marked the end of a project that we started 10 years ago.

Since buying our office, we’ve slowly been making progress towards cleaning it up and making it ours. We don’t want to spend a bunch of money on renovations right now, so we’ve mostly been focused on things that we can do for free. And as a result, the garden has seen the most notable improvement. Because pulling weeds? That’s a project that doesn’t cost a thing.

Want to see what we’ve gotten done so far? Just keep reading. I’ll be posting regular updates here, so you can follow along, as we work to create the garden of our dreams. Expect to see lots of curb finds and freebies along the way because we’re on a mission to do this for as little as possible.

Gardens take a long time to come together. Especially if you’re working on them a piece at a time to spread out the cost. And because of that, I think it’s really easy to become focused on what hasn’t been done yet or what hasn’t matured yet, rather than what you’ve accomplished. I find myself doing that all the time. I’ll see the privacy plantings that haven’t quite grown together yet, the fruit trees that haven’t started producing yet or a bare patch that I haven’t gotten around to planting. And in doing so, I’ll completely overlook how far we’ve come already.

So, I thought it would be fun to look at some before and afters of our garden, to show you where we started and where we’re at now. And to remind myself of the same.

Ready to dive into some before and after photos?

When we bought our house almost 11 years ago, it had four dying azaleas in the front yard and nothing else. We didn’t have any money to spare, so it stayed like that until 2009.

A local garden center had a promotion where they’d draw up a landscape design for your yard for $250, and then refund the $250 once you spent a certain amount on plants and materials (I think it was $1,000). We took advantage of that deal; made a bunch of tweaks to the design, and then hired some friends to help us landscape the front yard.

Here’s how it looks now. The new sidewalk and changes to the house came later.

Landscaping gets expensive, so we worked on our yard a section at a time. And that proved to be a good thing. By the time we got around to the backyard, I had decided that I wanted to focus on edibles, and so I redid our landscape design completely.