Landscaping for Dummies

Last week was my Spring Break (if you read my little blog regularly, I am sorry you have had to hear that statement so many times).  At the beginning of it, I made a to-do list of the things I wanted to accomplish with my extra time.  I am very happy to say that I accomplished everything on my list (well, except Chipper's grooming...who knew doggy haircuts were such an in demand item...we couldn't get an appointment until the next Tuesday!!!).  But my most exciting (and time consuming) accomplishment of my break was finally conquering our eyesore front flower beds.  This is what we were working with to start:

Because landscaping is something I have absolutely zero skill with, I first had to get some assistance.  One of my coworkers is a gardening guru, so I sent her some pictures of my flowerbeds and their dimensions.  We, then, came up with a color scheme (purple and white to go with our red brick) and started picking out different plants to fill in my beds.  The Friday before Spring Break, she helped me put together a plan.  I'm big on symmetry, so luckily that made the plan easier because the same things were repeated on both sides.  Here's a (very bad) photoshop version of our easy plan:

With plan in hand, it was time to get to work.  We had tons of plants already in the beds, but unfortunately most of them were not going to stay with our revamped plan (in fact, the holly bushes weren't originally part of the plan, but I had to put them in to use *something* from our existing beds).  Therefore, my first step involved a lot of digging, tugging, and hauling (to the backyard where the plants remain until we figure out what to do with them).  This part was a pain in the butt, mainly because the previous owners had laid some sort of tarp down in the beds that I'm guessing is meant to protect the soil and prevent weeds.  In other words, it was probably a good thing to have in the beds, but had to be cut in order to remove the plants.  It took me awhile to figure this out, though, as I kept trying to dig and wondered why my shovel would only go so deep...gggrrrrrr (that's a grunt).  Anyways, once I got going and had a system, the work went much quicker.  Basically, it took me a couple of hours (spread out over two Colton nap days) to clear the two beds.  At the end, this is what I had:

Whew!!!  Next up was my favorite part of any process...the shopping!  First, we headed to Home Depot, but they did not have any of the plants that I needed (which made me realize why my other landscaping attempts of just purchasing things that looked pretty from Home Depot probably failed miserably).  So, we got back in the car and headed to McDonald's Nursery.  The good news was McDonald's most definitely had my plants.  The bad news was that the price of those plants was such that my lovely husband may have had a heart attack, so I tried to make some compromises.  For one, I bought the smaller, less developed azaleas because they were half the price of the more developed ones.  For another, I tried to buy less of certain plants (like 2 azaleas under each window instead of three, 3 liriope instead of 5) and forego others altogether (like the trees and lilies).
When I got home and planted what I had, the beds were looking better, but obviously still needed a few more plants (and money spent).  ***I should have taken a picture so you could see, agree with me, and let Josh know...the man hates spending money!***  So, again, I made some compromises.  We still skipped the tree altogether, and instead, replanted one of our former holly bushes in the middle of each bed (for now...tree will be purchased eventually!).  I did head back to McDonalds for more liriope (they were only $6 each), and I got two lilies for each side (again, we can always get  more later, right).  Well, after all that planting (and this super long post), I am happy to report that this is what our flower beds look like now:

Improvement, right?  It's a little hard to tell, I know, because most of these plants will take a little while to develop since we went with the budget option, but I think it already looks much snazzier than our sparse version from just a week ago.  So, keep your fingers crossed for some rain (although did you catch that super cute purple hose/sprinkler from Target I snagged to keep the beds moist...I mean, seriously, that place has EVERYTHING!) and sun, so my little plants can grow.

What about you all?  Any landscaping accomplishments lately?  Or tips for me as far as how to keep these things growing?