House Update: The Exterior Wall

Hi Everyone! It's been a while since I posted about exterior progress on the house. I've been doing some toying around with paint colors which I hope to post about soon.  But most recently the big project was fixing our garden retaining wall. Our house sits up from the street and the there is a long stone wall on both street sides of the property.  The wall was in ok conditions in certain places and was completely falling apart in others. There was a large vine (think 4" diameter) coming out of the wall in one location.  We decided to go ahead and have the wall repaired so that we could plant in the bed between the fence and the wall come spring.  We also decided that the side entry to the house was way too narrow. Some people would walk past it and miss it altogether, so now was the time to widen it and make it more welcoming.  Here is what it looked like last fall before we cut down that awful vine.

Cutting it down improved it but then just revealed the damaged wall behind.

Here is some progress from when we built the fence and added our patio.

And here it is in progress.

As you can see, we also added a retaining wall next to the driveway (which allowed us to get rid of some rotting railroad ties and gives us space for planting). We also expanded the back patio space so our Airbnb has a little bit of outdoor space as well.  Here are some final shots of the wall and garden area (added a few shrubs which will screen the driveway nicely in the future).

 I'm excited to get fall cleanup started but sad that our planting season is coming to an end. Time to do some plant research and planning for next year! and finalize our exterior paint colors.