Front Yard - Before

Changes are afoot in the front yard! Before all the work is finished, I figured I should remember what it looked like before. Last year, the front garden looked like this:

The lawn in all it's green glory

The front yard was one of the first things I "fixed" after moving into the house. After all, when the first thing two of my neighbors asked was "welcome to the street, when are you fixing your yard?", I can take a hint! At that point, I didn't have much experience gardening in the desert yet, so while a lot of the front garden ended up not being grass (dry stream bed, planting beds), going with grass most of where it had been before made some sense. There is a narrow planting bed up near the house that allowed me to start experimenting with plants:

The planting beds (about a year ago)

As I figured out more and more things to grow (and decided I really didn't like mowing), I started to think about removing the grass. Especially after the back garden was done with no grass, and the drought carried on, it became more obvious that taking out the grass was a good idea. The final push was a few simple things: the drought got worse, there were rebates, and i realized just how much water the lawn was taking... Since my back garden is mostly desertscape, I switched to the same watering schedule in the front as in the back, and within about 2 weeks, the front garden looked like this:

horrible looking grass

mostly dead grass

The plants that were not grass were fine, which helped me realize how much extra water had been going to the lawn. And then my lawn mower broke too, so that was the end of that! After a few weeks of research, measuring and a design sketch, I was able to get the same landscape contractor I've used before to great results to come tear out the grass, update the irrigation, do hardscaping, and add some plants. After the first day of work, I came home to a blank slate:

Here we go!