Planting our Flower Beds (and other house projects that have kept us busy)

**click on pics to make them bigger!**

This is me (Rachel) and my husband (Eric), and we've lived in our new house for almost 6 months now.  I cannot believe the time has gone by so fast!
The first couple of months after moving in were a complete blur; full of sorting through our belongings and taking donations to Goodwill (I think I've made 3 trips to Goodwill so far, and I need to make a 4th sometime soon), organizing, tackling small projects around the house, cleaning, unpacking, and realizing we needed to buy SO much stuff for the house.
The windows didn't even have curtain rods on them, so we quickly became VIP customers at Home Depot and Walmart because we had to buy everything from curtain rods & curtains, WD-40, carpet cleaner, spatulas, clothes rods to install in the closets, entryway rugs and a new garbage disposal unit for under our kitchen sink, because the old one was dead as a doornail.
But after the initial crazy rush to get our stuff into the house and organized enough so the house was actually livable, now we can tackle projects on our own time frame; there's no rush to get stuff done.

This is our most recently completed project: planting flowers in our front flower beds to increase the curb appeal of our house and just in general add some much-needed color and order to the area around the front of our house.  The old soil in the beds had been sitting unused for over 4 years (that's about how long neighbors say our house sat abandoned before we bought it), so we pulled weeds, added tons of compost, good soil, peat, and manure to the beds, and planted them with Hostas, Primroses, and Azaleas.  (You can see the other front flower bed in the top left corner of the picture).  I can't tell you how much beauty is added to the yard just by planting some plants & flowers!
And we really feel like this is just what our house had been lacking.  Now the house looks like it has owners who really care for it and love it; and we do!
The paint on the exterior of our house in a light green; it's the original paint from 14 years ago when it was built, and it's pretty drab and faded.  We are eventually going to paint the exterior of our house, but we need to save up money for that.  So in the meantime, rescuing and revamping the yard will have to suffice!  This is a picture of the front exterior of our house.  Can you see the faded greenish-grey? 

Eventually, we want to paint our house a darker green and want it to look more like this:

Of course, that second house is much bigger than ours and has lots more trim work and windows, but you get the idea.  We like the darker green with the natural wood-brown front door and the lighter colored trim.