What's Under the Rug?
/Sometimes you don’t want to know what’s lurking under something. Other times you totally do.
My lakeside “landscape” was leaving a lot to be desired. The slope from the house and deck down to the lakefront lawn was just mulch, some tree stumps, completely overgrown crabgrass, and a LOT of Creeping Charlie (multiple truck loads). In the fall, I pulled out all the crabgrass to try and tidy things up a bit, and I spent all winter brooding over what I would do with this landscaping to give it some panache as soon as the weather cooperated. The lake side is where my “curb appeal” needs to be, and this isn’t doing it for me.
This is how bad it looked in the fall
Spring 2021 before starting work
What has been most intriguing is that the guy who laid the landscape fabric and mulch (I’m assuming at the prior homeowner’s request to just make it look somewhat decent) told me that it’s just “garbage” under there and not to pull it up.
So of course, I decided first order of spring business would be to pull it up. What would I find under there? The next door neighbor also referred to this as “trash” and I was dreadfully curious - what was under there? I know that the original homeowner tore down the original cottage that was on the property to build the home, and he ran a pier business out of here, so did they mean actual garbage? Like literal trash? The curiosity was killing this cat.
So, one Saturday in March, I started pulling it up. I started raking off the mulch and then decided that it would be easier to just take the snow shovel and plow it down the slope…but later regretted that decision because then it was all in the grass and was a royal pain in the ass to get it back up on the slope.
I started at the top of the slope and the first thing I found was some very nice pieces of lannon stone! WHY would they leave that buried under there? Lannon stone is great for landscapes and it’s not cheap. So, I set those aside and kept going…
I found more lannon stone on my way, and then got to the bottom and started to find really large rocks, ranging from about 6-16”! The landscaper had said that he had pulled the stones that he used for the lame border around this, but I had no idea there would be this much more underneath. I felt like I hit the jackpot! It almost seemed as if these rocks had once been some sort of border wall because they were largely gathered at the bottom, but that may have just been more a function of gravity than anything else.
I dug out the big rocks because I knew I wanted to use them and started to work my way from the bottom back up - smoothing out the grade and laying the landscape fabric back in place.
One thing that I really didn’t like was the single row of stone used as a border. It just seemed half-assed, and didn’t look nice. So, I started to stack some more to create a thicker border (not a wall).
My next idea was to use the lannon stone that I had pulled out to create little outcroppings to provide some visual interest. So, I dug into the slope in a few spots to give the lannon stone a place to sit. I pulled the landscape fabric back into place and cut out a few areas to plant some perennials (creeping phlox, periwinkle/vinca, shasta daisies, hostas, a few different types of stonecrop and a small juniper. Hopefully the vinca, phlox and stonecrop will spread and provide some nice ground cover over time.
I also picked up a truckload of river rock and originally planned to use the rock as mulch over the whole thing, but I quickly realized that probably wasn’t going to work due to gravity, so I changed gears and used some of the stone to create a little dry river down the middle of the slope and began shoveling the mulch back onto the landscape fabric.
I also have a corrugated pipe that runs down the side of the property that my sump pump discharges into and empties into the lake (and I don’t know if that’s completely legit or not). My problem is that I have this ugly black pipe that gets overgrown with Creeping Charlie and I don’t want to look at it. So, I decided to cut it shorter and route it to empty at the top of my little dry river on the slope.
I also realized that all of my gutters drain underground through some drain pipe and found the exit in the slope to the right of the deck. I put in a dry river there too for the rainwater runoff. There was another one that catches rainwater from the driveway that was full of more large rocks that I wanted to reuse in my thicker border, so I pulled those up, put down some weed fabric, and replaced it with the smaller river rock.
I then tackled the side of the house, which was absolutely overrun with Creeping Charlie. I pulled all of it by hand, which was super fun and fast (NOT). Once it was all pulled up, I laid down some weed fabric and put in some metal edging and mulch. I dug in the corrugated drain pipe a little bit (not all the way in) and wound it around the trees to my little dry river. Mrs. Brady supplied some hostas from their yard, so I plopped those in and planted a clematis in hopes it will grow up my little vine trellis.
As I’ve been working on it, I have been getting a lot of encouragement from boaters passing by, which really keeps me motivated. Almost every boat that comes by and sees me working out there compliments me and says it looks great (and I’m sure some of them have been passing by for years and can truly appreciate the difference). I kept telling them to grab a shovel and help me out, but there were no takers!
As I stand and look at it, I cannot believe that all of those stones came out from under the “rug” of landscaping fabric. I have no idea how much purchasing that much weight in large stones would have cost, but I’m sure it would have been a pretty hefty chunk of change. I feel very satisfied that I did this all by myself for under $200 (I spent about $50 on the river rock for my little dry rivers, $100 on new mulch, and about $50 in plants).
I also pulled down the four coach lights on the deck and refreshed them. The wooden mounting plates were sort of the same color as the house, but not quite, so up close it looked goofy. The lights themselves were perfectly fine, nice metal lights with glass inserts, but they were a dull aluminum color. I spray painted them black and painted the mounting plates white to match the trim. The “before” photo below is technically not the same light, but same general idea of how crappy they looked.
The concrete stairs are a hot mess. They’re completely breaking apart, each rise/run is different (and I’m not talking a minor 1/4”-3/8” difference, we’re talking multiple inches), so that’s on the list of something to tackle next year. I’d like to put in stone steps instead of concrete, but that’s going to be a job for someone else. After relocating all these stones, I’m done, and will leave the true heavy lifting to professionals! The railing is janky as shit and one of the 4x4 posts is hobbled together with 1x4s, so that needs to get replaced completely. For now, though, I tore out the rotting spindles and painted the railing white. I picked up some pressure treated lumber and made new spindles which will get painted once they’ve dried out enough.
This took me a few months to get through. It was painstaking work, but in the end, I’m really happy with how it’s looking. The house got a new coat of paint, and I think the dark gray really makes the white trim pop. I’m planning to build some planter boxes to go under the 2nd story windows to give it a little something since there’s really nothing visually interesting on the facade of the house.
